Pop the Clutch

It was a random Tuesday morning. My soon to be husband had looked all over the world to find me the perfect rescue kitten – a calico – and had presented her to me over the weekend. Too late, we learned she was too young to be separated from her mom. But, mom had also been adopted and no one seemed to know where she’d gotten off to. So, the weekend had been a stressful one of kitten formula and tiny bottles and lots of burping. Things were going great, until they weren’t. I couldn’t find Phoebe anywhere. Spoiler alert, Phoebe cat survived but would be renamed Raptor due to her propensity for leaping across entire rooms and shredding people’s hands with her velociraptor-esque talons. This particular morning, however, she was just helpless little 3-week-old Phoebe, found collapsed in her litterbox, lifeless. I was on my way to work, but that all changed as I raced through town looking for any vet office open at 8:30 am. There was no time to turn on the radio. I had to call my boss, call clinics, call to make sure the kids made it to school. I had to wait for a clinic to open, wait for the vet to come and speak to me, wait for news on Phoebe. Finally, an exhausted version of me lurched into my office and sat down at my desk. Phoebe needed fluids and a mom willing to give her daily glucose injections for a while, but she would be ready to pick her up after work. Crisis averted. I became vaguely aware of a commotion in our company lobby, just beyond my sight line. There seemed to be some gasping, lots of movement, a sudden tenseness in the air. My cell phone rang. See, this was way before Facebook and Instagram. Myspace wasn’t even a thing yet. All Apple had produced was a very difficult to use computer and a guy named Steve who wore a lot of turtlenecks. I grabbed my Nokia flip phone, the one with the tiny front screen that looked like an aquarium with digitalized fish that were supposed to swim, but really just froze in one spot before suddenly darting 5 centimeters to the right only to freeze again. It was my ex-husband, calling to tell me, in case we never saw each other again, that it had been nice knowing me. I was perplexed. He was perplexed that I was so perplexed. See, I hadn’t heard. It was 9/11/2001 – the day Phoebe the cat almost died. It was the day they tried to take America down.

This past weekend, someone from my hometown, someone around my age, died from Covid. This past weekend, someone’s mom I went to high school with died from Covid. This past weekend, my best friend’s dad was hospitalized with Covid. He’s not projected to survive. This past weekend, that same best friend called to say she has Covid. And, on all these social media sites, the ones we did not yet have in 2001, there is so much information at our fingertips. Covid is another country’s fault. Covid is fake news. There is a shortage of hospital beds. There is not a shortage of hospital beds. There is a shortage of nurses. Nurses won’t work because they don’t want Covid. Nurses won’t work because they don’t want the Covid vaccine. Nurses are working their butts off. Livestock parasitic infestation medication will treat Covid. Livestock parasitic infestation medication will kill you. Masks will save you. Masks will not save you. Only certain kinds of masks will save you. The children should definitely go to school. The children should definitely not go to school. The current president is lying. The former president is lying. Aliens are killing us to make the cosmic takeover easier. Covid really came from the melting perma-frost due to climate change. There is no climate change. We do not know how to process this ridiculous amount of information. We are unable to ascertain whether the person presenting the study is really a doctor who really did a study or is yet another person cashing in on a tragedy for their 15 minutes of fame. Everyone hates everyone. None of us know which way is up.

Here are my own personal double blind study results, just in. We are only human. We can only process so much. We were never meant to have this level of exposure to this constant of a stream of information. Our brains are under attack, like little stagecoaches being robbed at gunpoint on the information highway. Yet, in 2001, we cared not whether our neighbors were affiliates of certain political parties or whether they were specific religions or races or genders. We cared that we were all on the same page, the American page. As the coverage for the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks came to a close this weekend, we received a very dire wakeup call. We were in a better place on 9/12/2001 than we are today. The world may have stopped turning like a broken down 1977 Pinto Station Wagon, but we were all behind her, pushing in the same direction, yelling, “Pop the clutch.” It’s time for another push start. Let’s not go out like this.