Pox Party!

Once upon a better time, the 1970s, there was a terrifying plague threatening all the land. Staten Island. Also Brooklyn. Maybe other places but the extent of this fairy tale is limited to the scope of a very limited narrator.

The narrator was a third grade student, whose flat world was limited to the far reaches of Flatbush and the Staten Island Mall.

The evil Chicken Pox! tore through our school’s student body leaving no one unscarred. Of course, people were unscarred but alas, this was the literal terror of it all: being permanently pox marked and losing the familiarity of our own reflections.

The Chicken Pox! was also exciting. It meant staying home from school and getting to tell everyone you had the Chicken Pox! It meant you were trending.

Having Chicken Pox! meant that you were dangerous. Sure, a healthy child would survive, but you possessed the power to potentially hurt fragile adults (our parents, aka Boomers) because we all knew the older you were, the worse it hit) and the show-off older siblings who boasted that their superior immune systems had overpowered Chicken Pox! time and again.

(We did care about the vulnerable, those who could suffer greatly, but in the immature binarism of little kids and politicians: everything was good or everything was doomed.)

We had Chicken Pox! Parties. Our parents’ herd immunity plan was to infect us all, hoping we would have childhood Chicken Pox! and the consquent antibodies, thereby protecting us from the adult version, and just getting it all over with. They wanted the shoe to drop, which in light of the Novel Coronavirus Pandemic, I totally get.

So it was with exhiliration that I heard about my friend’s diagnosis, just two days after a sleepover at my house. Chicken Pox! was imminent.

Chicken Pox! the reality lived up to the hype. As the dots started to appear, and the calamine lotion slathered, and the school notified, and the nails trimmed, I remember feeling “chosen.” How crazy is that? Of course, I also felt lethargic, itchy, and concerned about accidentally tearing my face off in my sleep. But the thrill of informing my friends that I HAD IT, was real.

How a couple of decades and an escaped bioweapon naturally occuring lethal Coronavirus put a different spin on contagion. Imagine a Covid party. For those who went on Spring Break, attended weddings slipped in “under the deadline” or flat out disobeyed rules for social distancing, you actually can. But the rest of us, particularly those Paul Revere/Cassandras who are my true people, this is like having an intense game of kickball in a Swarovski Crystal shop.

About 6 weeks ago I started to feel sick. The last thing I wanted to do was call anyone and tell them. Not that I had put anyone at risk, Not that I had been socializing (ever) but being that I was not unwell enough to be tested, and to presume I had a mild CV infection, I could not know for sure. Why cry wolf? Why cry anything? Sympathy and prayers are in unlimited supply, but come on. It would be ridiculous to come out as possibly Covid positive when the worst of my condition included “stayed in bed,” and “didn’t have to go down and cook or clean for the family.”

Yet now, I, as do so many others, wait for the shoe to drop.

I sincerely hope mine is a Jimmy Choo. Or a Chanel bootie with pearl detail.

We wait for serum testing. We wait to get the serious case of CV that we escaped. We wait.

We wait.

We wait.

We do inventory every morning. I’m still here. Good. I can breathe. Good. Let me check the news.

Shit.