When I lived in New York City and coped with the Lexington Avenue subway twice a day, my paranoia was very immediate.
It was easy to perceive that the sharp pain I had just felt in my kidney had been intentionally caused by the gent who had just pushed past me to get off the train at 14th Street, or that the reason my bag was stuck in the closing doors was somehow connected with the angry-looking woman who had been jockeying for the same precious section of space that I had.
Likewise, when my employer advised me that I would be transferring to the Stamford office for the second time despite the realization I shared with everyone in my division that Stamford was farther from 399 Park Avenue (Head Office, as we called it then) than the Singapore Office was, at least in terms of relevance, it was easy to assume that somehow the grey had shown through the Grecian Formula I had been diligently applying for several years in an effort to survive long enough to qualify for a pension, that my age was suddenly a major factor, and my demise was imminent.
But once I finally did get the pension and moved out to the dirt road in a more or less final way, the paranoia began to change.
There was a geographic change, of course.
Suddenly the issues -- or some of the issues -- began to be connected with rural life in Northwest Connecticut instead of New York City. But also, true to the oft-repeated witticism attributed to a long-term husband who points out that while his wife decides where they should live, and if they should get a new car, he makes the important decisions -- like whether we should withdraw from Iraq -- sometimes the paranoia can become national in scope, if not global.
It occurred to me, shortly after the Hurricane Katrina fiasco, when reading the news on-line, that this natural disaster certainly represented a veritable potential gold mine for the principal constituency of the current ruling part in the United States -- namely the sleazy side of corporate America. I saw the name of a company given that would have a no-bid contract to provide mortuary and forensic services to FEMA during and after this disaster. Some of my years with my career employer were spent in positions related to emergencies of various kinds, so I decided to see just who this company was.
It took a lot of spadework to get to the bottom of this one. After wading through a not-small website looking for ANYTHING to identify just who this company was, finally, at the bottom of a screen several layers deep, I discovered that they were a subsidiary of Service Corporation International. Well, I thought at the time, that's actually good. Service Corporation International owns most of the mortuary establishments in the South, so they should have a good handle on this kind of business. In fact, we had buried most of my wife's late relatives via a Service Corporation International mortuary in Chattanooga, and they seemed to do a pretty good job.
Okay, it was a production line -- that was pretty evident -- but in a disaster, that's just what you want, isn't it? I mean, regardless of who gets paid, efficiency is really important at a time like that, right?
Living on that dirt road, I let my New York City paranoia gradually diminish.
However, for the last couple of weeks, it has become evident that whatever the sub of Service Corporation International had been hired to do, it was NOT to deal with the dead from New Orleans! There are still several hundred of these unfortunates unidentified, not to mention unburied, and the Feds are having a battle with the State about who should pay for DNA testing for them.
So, tonight, my paranoia snapped back into focus. What about this Service Corporation International sub that got the no-bid contract to make this whole problem into a NON-problem? Where are they in this whole mess? Is that decaying people from New Orleans that I smell, or is it a rat? Given the state where Service Corporation International is headquartered (you could look that up, as Casey Stengel used to say), my guess is that I cannot smell decomposing people all the way up in New England, but that I can still smell a rat pretty acutely.
The paranoia, as I promised a few paragraphs above, actually does still work on a local level.
We oldsters, out here in the boonies, make it an annual ritual to get our flu shot when we go to Town Hall to vote in November. The polling is on the third floor -- and it does step right along, so you really need to have your voting pretty well planned before you get in line, if there is a line at all -- and the flu shots are traditionally on the first floor.
Well, last year, there weren't any flu shots. Nobody was much surprised. The news had made it clear that there had been a major screw-up, and that very few of us antiques would be getting flu shots at all. Well, we all sucked in and voted and shuffled back out of Town Hall without our first floor stop-off.
This year, however, I do clearly remember some fresh-faced young spokeswoman of some agency of the executive branch of our Federal government telling all of us that there was enough flu vaccine out there to sink several battleships, and there would be absolutely no problem in getting a flu shot. "Well, at least the Administration has been able to get this right!" I remember thinking.
The first hint that I had been led astray, and that I should have worked harder at retaining my paranoia came when my wife returned from voting (she went in the morning and I planned to make a separate trip into town in the afternoon) and reported that there was no flu shot clinic, that they hadn't been able to get any vaccine. She had later learned at the Post Office that there would be a flu shot clinic in a couple of weeks at the local drugstore, so we both relaxed a bit.
Yesterday was the clinic at the local drugstore. I had noticed that there had been no notice of it in the newspaper, and that the usually-effective word-of-mouth avenue of communication hadn't carried this one either. Thus, I asked her to call the drugstore and find out if the clinic was real or imagined.
She called, and found that the clinic started at 10 AM, and that they had been only able to obtain 100 doses of vaccine so getting there in a timely manner was important. We got there at 9:45 and ended up as numbers 55 and 56, so we were pretty much home free. Interestingly, though, as the line grew, and as I noticed more and more of the public figures in town just in front of me and just behind me, I started to see people from the neighboring towns as well.
People from Sharon, from Cornwall -- these people had come to Salisbury for their flu shots too! A little questioning revealed that these towns had received NO flu vaccine! Furthermore, the little hospital that makes a real effort to serve our needs up here, Sharon Hospital, was -- guess where? Sharon! A town that got no vaccine!
The nurses from the Salisbury Visiting Nurses were friendly and efficient. They really ran us through there, at roughly a shot a minute, which is really pretty good. Okay, not as good as the Army was, but still pretty good.
Only after I left, and after I talked to my daughter in Chicago that evening, and learned that there wasn't any flu vaccine there either, did I begin to re-activate my dependable paranoia. How did the towns of Salisbury, Sharon, and Cornwall vote in the last presidential election? In what way was that similar to the way Chicago voted?
I am assuming that I do not have to draw you a picture.
I am beginning to think that the paranoia that I spent thirty-five years developing in New York City was not entirely a wasted effort. In fact, it seems pretty clear to me, out here on the dirt road, that the Bush administration has allocated flu vaccine on the basis of blue states and red states.
There's a logical conclusion, and, when you are on the north side of sixty, it's not a pleasant one: they want us dead.
As my first wife's elderly aunt used to say: "Happy days!"
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