M. L. E. Brown
‘Community transmission’ is a term the entire world will be much more familiar with after the Covid-19 pandemic. In medical parlance, the term refers to the apparent absence of epidemiological link within a community beyond its confirmed cases. It might also be applied in a holistic sense, when the reach of mass catastrophe seeps into cultural and emotional memory.
My parents were older than those of my schoolmates. Born in 1913 and 1918 respectively, they were middle-aged by the time I was born in 1966. Theirs was the generation of New Zealand infants who started life scarred by the immediate effects of World War One. My mother was a wonderful sick-nurse. I remember an occasion when my elderly aunt and uncle caught a serious ‘flu. I recall myself in my mid-teens, hovering in the kitchen of their villa while my mother swept upstairs bearing reheated lunches she had pre-cooked at our place; and then downstairs again with linen and towels to be flung in my aunt’s ancient washing machine.
I wasn’t allowed upstairs. “Don’t eat that!” my mother snapped as I picked up a malt biscuit left over from my uncle’s barely-touched tray. She, who could never abide waste of any sort, scraped all the untouched food onto a tin plate and marched it out to the compost. She gave me some rubber gloves and told me to do the dishes and scrub the bench thoroughly with hot water and Vim. Afterwards, I mopped the kitchen and laundry floors with even hotter water and Janola while she returned upstairs to help the afflicted pair from their chairs back to the master bed she had already re-made with clean linen.
Today was our deadline. It was still dark when we hugged on the driveway. Your embrace felt solid, warm, stable. Within it I felt frail. We don’t know who is more at risk. You, with your chronic night cough. The insufficient protective gear. The leaky protocols. Me, with a relapsing and remitting immunological disease and on the wrong side of fifty. Children are supposed to be okay, but what about our middle daughter, the one with severe allergies, who is taken down for weeks, even by a common cold?
There seem to be more dogs getting walked these days – or are we just doing it all at the same time? Dog walking, I would argue, is important for both physical and mental health. We have been committed dog walkers from graduate school days when we dog-sat a Newfoundland and a Labrador. Our first dog, Taffy, a Welsh terrier, was a present to my Dad on his seventieth birthday in the hope that he would take more walks to help his heart condition. When my Dad’s heart gave out two years later, we took over the naughty and ill-trained dog from my unable-to-cope mother. Taffy returned to my mother five years later – a bit calmer – when we went overseas on study leave. When we came back, we saw how that naughty dog had enhanced my mother’s life. Those walks around her neighbourhood kept her fit and brought her new friends. At home he was great company. There was no way Taffy was coming back to us.
At a time when we are all isolated in our homes, teddy-bear-in- the-window hunts might keep exercising children amused in the street. Dunedin people are getting into the spirit. Our household currently lacks a teddy bear but we’ve put our wooden duck in the window as a tiny effort to relieve tedium. All round us people are engaging in acts of kindness: a wave from the window, a phone call or email to a distant friend, and then the essential workers – particularly those in the health system, providing treatment and care for on-going needs. In the face of relentless bad news, these acts keep us grounded and sane. And some people are truly inventive.
Remember MRS GREN, the mnemonic for the biological features necessary for organic life? Movement, Respiration, Sensation, Growth, Reproduction, Excretion, Nutrition. The great shared factor – the one that is present in them all – is movement, which occurs at some level, micro or macro, during every one of these functions. This intimate association between life and movement is reflected in human languages, which are laden with movement-related metaphors, imagery and symbolism. In English, for example, we speak of life cycles and seasonal cycles, of money or kindness making the world go round, of giving the nod or of shaking things off. We advise ‘going forward’ and ‘moving on’. We run ideas past other people; we are caught on the hop; we leap to conclusions; we take it step by step. Life, we say, is a journey. Sometimes we see the path clearly and lope along. Sometimes, however, we can’t see the woods for the trees, or our plans are stalled, or the wheels fall off, and everything comes to a grinding halt.