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From A Fortune Cookie

Writer's picture: Feef MooneyFeef Mooney

I am getting lost in thoughts about words floating around the news cycles and group speaks on Facebook. Over and over, these Dystopian themes repeat: "Herd Immunity" and "Darwinian Survival of the Fittest." The words and terms are big and abstract, but feel life-threatening, just the same. They relate to the horrors of Nazis who believed some lives were worth more than others.

But I come back to Identity, because who I am seems to change in perspective. The looming virus curtails physical contact with those I love. What I do, in the privacy of my home, recalls the "If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears, does the tree really fall?" And because of this isolation, i am more driven to use cyberspace, just to communicate, to hope that someone reads what I am feeling and thinking. This isn't a conversation,that thing that sparks brain cells to ignite and rapid fire responses. There are, of course, telephone chats, and Skype gatherings. Still, the distancing is exhausting. There are no pheromones online.

Is my Identity what I manifest on a screen?

Lately, I crave the feeling of other people. The smell of coats that have been worn more than 100 times. The look of smudged lipstick. The smell of shampoo. Scuffs on dress shoes. Wind and the movement of lots of bodies towards the subway. Smell of sausages cooking on a hotplate under a weathered umbrella. Sound of Spanish, staccato like rings of tiny buzzing insects.

I miss my old friends, from the Royal Bellingham, where I used to work. I miss the lines in faces, the slightly yeasty breath, the soft hands, folded in laps. The old blankets. The wheelchairs. The blatant smells of body functions.

But even more, I miss the storytelling aspect of time. I remember sitting with the elders in a circle. I would ask questions, like, "Do you remember when there was no TV?" There would come a pause, and then someone would speak," We had a big radio we used to sit around. Our whole family. I remember the Armchair Talks. " Then someone else would chime in: "That was FDR!

We used to listen to him every night." One question would lead to another, and suddenly history was reborn in their stories.

I find myself yearning for old buildings, old Los Angeles, old movies. Is it because I want to escape talk of Herd Immunity? My Identity seems to hinge on the stories of the elders. I need to know what the world was like before I was in it.

I remember my old friends who survived The Great Depression. I remember Anne Cohen used to say, ironically, "Great ? No, I never thought the Depression was that GREAT!!"

I am aware of death. People who shaped my life have recently gone. John Prine. Bill Withers. Brian Dennehy.

What scares me is a world in which old people don't matter. Everything old is new to me. I want to have these people in my life. I want to learn life by being with them, seeing how they survive.

An old friend of mine once said, "Getting older is not for sissies!"

I crave old buildings, oddities, weird and unusual Los Angeles. The idea of all buildings looking the same, all food being produced to taste the same everywhere, a world of franchises, all controlled by the same corporations, is suffocating to me,

Do we want to thin The Herd of Culture? Eliminate what is creaky? Strange? Unusual? Imperfect?

Eliminate that and those who need some help? Youth must be served, yes, but without the Old, who am I? And who will I become? And will I too soon lie on the trash heap of the discarded?

I guess it all comes down to a couple of things: what is Society? And what do we most value within it?

The elders seem to have known what sacrifice was about. Maybe we need to hear how they survived their own tough times. Maybe with these old Memories, can come Young Hopes.

After all, it is soon Spring. And I have always had a weird trust in Fortune Cookies.

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