19
•
HUNGRY MONTH
February–March As I grow older, more of my close friends are elderly people. I suppose I am auditioning, in some sense, to join their club. My generation will no doubt persist in wearing our blue jeans right into the nursing homes, kicking out Lawrence Welk when we get there and cranking up “Bad Moon Rising” to maximum volume. But I do find myself softening to certain features of the elder landscape. Especially, I’m coming to understand that culture’s special regard for winter. It’s the season to come through. My eighty-four-year-old neighbor is an incredibly cheerful person by all other standards, but she will remark of a relative or friend, “Well, she’s still with us after the winter.” It’s not just about icy sidewalks and inconvenience: she lost two sisters and a lifelong friend during recent winters. She carries in living memory a time when bitter cold and limited diets compromised everyone’s immunities, and the weather forced people to hunker down and share contagions. Winter epidemics took their heartbreaking due, not discriminating especially between the old and the young. For those of us who have grown up under the modern glow of things like vaccinations, penicillin, and central heat, it’s hard to retain any real sense of this. We flock indoors all the time, to work and even to exercise, sharing our germs in all seasons. But vitamins are ready at hand any time, for those who care, and antibiotics mop up the fallout.