Residents walk past a playground at David Livingston School in Vancouver in this file photo from June 28, 2004.CHRIS BOLIN/The Globe and Mail
Dan Yashinsky is a storyteller and author.
It seems like the whole world has caught the cooties. When I was a kid in Detroit in the 1950s, it was very bad if you had the cooties. No one wanted to touch you, let alone be your friend. It was like being the village leper at Vernor Elementary School. Our school was named after the man who invented our favourite ginger ale, cups of which were handed out whenever we had to sit in the halls during nuclear-attack drills. Our seemingly imminent vaporization by intercontinental ballistic missiles was made more palatable by the sweet taste of pop.
The cooties, however, were far worse than those imaginary bombs. I managed to get to Grade 4 before I acquired a bad case of them. I’m still not sure why or how I fell out of favour, though I do remember that by Grade 5 one of the popular kids wanted to fight me and I had to punch him right in his handsome nose to get him to leave me alone. I remember he cried and I wanted to, but didn’t. He left me alone after that.
Nowadays we’ve all got the cooties. We’ve learned not to touch or be touched. We wear masks to guard against droplet – or is it aerosolized? – transmission. We wear disposable gloves when we go shopping. We keep our distance in our houses and apartments and whatever commons we can still walk in. We do impromptu sidewalk quadrilles and do-si-dos when others walk toward us. Tragically, though for commonsensical public-health reasons, we’ve cut off contact with the most fragile among us – our elders, our ill. This novel cootie – invisible, unfamiliar and surprisingly powerful – has created a whole new game we’re all just learning to play. The rules of the game may be simple – don’t give it, don’t get it – but living with courage, meaning and generosity in this newly vulnerable world is not.
Yet some sense of play survives; play means creativity and creativity means life. Maybe our new safety-minded public decorum is more like playing tag than having a transnational case of the cooties. When I walk my dog in the ravine, she sometimes finds a playmate and the game begins: I’ll-chase-you-and-then-you-chase-me. For us bipeds, the game is called “tag.” When you get tagged, you become “It” – until, of course, you tag someone else and devolve your “Itness” onto them. Then you’re free again – until you get caught again.
But what happens when you can’t de-It yourself by tagging the next person? What if we just have to live with being “It” until the end of the pandemic?
Our masks, which seemed so intrusive a few weeks ago, have become another part of this childlike game, updated for the times. When I walk into a store where I know the owner, I get to say stuff like, “Hands in the air! This is a holdup!” Then we both laugh. (Please don’t try this unless you know the store owner quite well.) Masks give power, as we know from Halloween or carnival traditions. Walking along the sidewalk with my face concealed, I get to flash my eyes meaningfully at strangers, crinkling them into smile lines or giving my best dead-eye stare depending on whether they seem to be smiling under their masks, or getting ready to make some officious comment about my dog taking up too much space on the sidewalk. Let’s face it: It’s fun to look like a bandit.
Ring Around the Rosie is another piece of children’s lore that comes to mind these days. It is said to have its origins in one of the plagues that beleaguered England in the Middle Ages and again in the 1600s. The ring refers to a form of rash that was a telltale symptom; posies were carried to fend off noxious airs, and we can well imagine the sense of “We all fall down.” Except that the rhyme very likely has nothing to do with death and plagues.
Most folklorists believe now that it began as – and still is, all around the world – a reference to a kind of playful courtship party. It’s still a bit transgressive, as so many children’s rhymes are. (You might remember, “In the land of Oz, where the ladies wear no bras …”.) But it’s likely a way of playing at romance, not a commentary on the bubonic plague. The posy is a pretend bouquet offered by the person in the middle to someone in the circle; “Husha, husha,” is everyone in the circle getting quiet and suspenseful; and “all fall down” is the general collapse into hilarity after the embarrassed chooser bows down or curtsies to the even-more-embarrassed chosen one. The rhyme is probably about love, not death. Sometimes a posy is really just a posy.
My mother died in the winter of 2019, a year before the pandemic. I often wonder what she, with her hard-earned wisdom, would have made of this new way of life. She herself survived vicious anti-Semitism, bombs in Bucharest, a devastating seven-year separation from her father, and a Messerschmitt aircraft attacking her as she ran through the streets to get medicine for her sick mother.
I grew up hearing her survivor stories, my favourite being the one where she and her mother were liberated by a Red Army officer who happened to be Jewish. A miracle, still talked about in my family, cherished along with the silver candlesticks that she and her mother brought over from Romania at war’s end and that I light at Passover in her memory. To her (like all Jewish mothers, a great believer in and hoarder of hand sanitizer long before the virus hit), these changes to our daily lives would have seemed difficult, but they’re way better than being strafed by Nazis.
The greatest, oldest game in the world is probably peek-a-boo. A baby finds it hugely thrilling as the face of a mother or father disappears behind a curtain of fingers – elemental theatre! – before the curtain parts with flourish, fanfare and a “BOO!” as the beloved and familiar face pops back into focus. The suspense is delicious and exhilarating, and the reveal is epic. Life today is also filled with suspense. Our faces are literally hidden from one another.
But one day, the masks will come off. We will have a chance to peek-a-boo with the faces of other humans. Will those that reappear be lit with kindness and compassion? Or will they be filled with fear and suspicion? Will we see the faces of bridge-builders or wall-makers?
In this moment of global transformation, we’ve all been tagged. We’re all “It.” No touch-backs.
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