Fire History, Visit with Barbara White, & A Letter To The Kid In The Attic On Flu Epidemic

Sunday, May 3^rd, marked the anniversary of the city of Jacksonville’s burning down in 1901. In connection with commemorating the Great Fire Of Jacksonville, the Jacksonville Fire Museum revamped its website at http://www.jacksonvillefiremuseum.com/index.html

For sections of the new site, they used portions of my book Heroes All: A History Of Firefighting In Jacksonville available at www.bluefishbooks.info .

That’s nice.

Unfortunately, when crediting my book as a source, they did not provide a link enabling people to consider buying a copy.

After all my years of work on that book, I find that disheartening.

Oh well, God knows.

Monday my friend Barbara White, author of the Along The Way series of books, treated me to breakfast at Dave’s Diner and she related a recent dream:

Barbara, who is around 80 and walks with an aluminum walker, dreamed she was in a house where a murderer tried to break in and kill her. She locked the screen door. But he said ,”That’s no barrier” and cut the screen to unlock the door.

She slammed the wooden front door. But the killer said, “That’s no barrier either” and cut his way through.

She ran out the back door through the streets of her childhood hometown. Racing to escape the murderer.

She saw a man on an odd bicycle with a boat on a little trailer—but the bicycle was pushing the boat instead of pulling it. Two other people on regular bicycles followed him. She ran to them seeking help.

The man on the bicycle smiled, took out his cell phone and called the murderer to tell him where she was!

The other two cyclists looked on with approval.

Barbara woke in a panic, heart aflutter. She remembered the tension between her and her grown son. She began to recite the 23^rd Psalm, “The Lord is my Shepherd…”

She realized her own frailty and vulnerability in danger, yet she realized that she is still alive in the midst of whatever dangers.

Besides that disturbing dream, Barbara and I talked about God’s act of creation; Barbara told me about St. Augustine’s idea that just as God made oak tree seeds and sunflower seeds to grow and mature and flourish and die in different given time frames, so also He ordered animals, men and worlds to grow, mature, flourish and die in specific different given time frames.

I’d never thought of things that way before.

Here’s a letter to the Kid In The Attic:

Hi Kid,

You are my ideal reader.

You are the person I write for.

I picture you in my mind’s eye when I enter things in my diary. In my imagination, some day 50 or a hundred years from now, long after I’m dead and gone, you will be prowling around in the attic on a rainy afternoon, and you’ll stumble across a dusty old box containing my diary. You’ll beat off the dust and roach crumbs and read to see what life was like in the old days (that’s my today).

I wish you joy, Kid In The Attic.

Mostly I write so you will see how being a Christian works for one lone individual—me. By tracing my daily entries, you may get an idea of Christian reality in the life of one guy—me. You’ll see the ups, downs, sins and warts, the discouragements and elations, the problems I solved and the ones that beat me.

So, mainly this is a spiritual map of one isolated soul…

But to give you historical perspective, I think it important to mention world events now and them so you can see the context in which I lived.

Now, I’m certainly no Samuel Pepys nor John Evelyn, who both chronicled the 1666 Great Plague of London.

Nor am I a Daniel Defoe, the novelist who wrote his fictional Journal Of The Plague Year in 1722 (that’s the same year he wrote Moll Flanders) but you probably know him best for Robinson Crusoe.

However, Swine flu is much in the news now and it behooves me to mention it now and then.

So, here goes.

Today, one Jacksonville school quarantined a coach and two students in a hotel, even though none of the three showed any sign of infection, because they’d recently been to a swim meet in Mexico .

Today also, the school board of an adjacent county closed down one school because one student may possibly have swine flu. The student is being tested and the results are not back yet. But they still shut down the whole school for at least two days and disinfected the bus that student rode on.

What’s odd about this is that in the entire United States only one person has died of this disease so far.

Isn’t that incredible?

Here’s something odder:

“Across the country, more than 14,000 persons with AIDS died in 2006... These AIDS cases and deaths should not be happening in this country at this rate”.

That’s a quote from Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, Director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

She made this statement in a report to Congress last September. Her full speech is at the CDC website: http://www.cdc.gov/washington/testimony/2008/t20080916.htm .

Now, Kid, I hope in your generation, AIDS is a cured disease of the distant past. But it is real and deadly in my generation. I do not know of a single person who ever caught it who did not eventually die of it (unless they got hit by a bus or something first). But as far as I know from having read in the past issues of the CDC Weekly Mortality and Morbidity Report, anyone who gets it, will die of it. The CDC issues regular reports about pediatric AIDS.

Yet, no schools close.

No swim teams quarantined.

No school buses disinfected.

I’d like to think that the difference in responding to one disease with one death and responding to another virus with 14,000 dying is a difference in timing. After all, a virulent flue virus (remember Spanish Lady?) can kill in a matter of days, that generates a sense of urgency; on the other hand the AIDS virus may take years to kill.

I’d like to think that’s the difference, but I imagine that true difference is a matter of political lobbying and public relations tactics which downplay AIDS.

Of course that virus spreads through sex or blood contact.

Maybe it’s just that school kids today don’t get cuts and scrapes and bloody noses in fights or don’t take off the band aid to show off sores.

Get real.

Dr. Gerberding projected 56,300 new HIV infections to occur each year, “Worse than previously estimated,” she said.

She said it is a shame “For young Americans to grow up without the knowledge, skills, confidence and motivation necessary to protect themselves against HIV for their entire lifetimes. CDC is steadfast in its commitment to ending the epidemic; however, to achieve this goal, the HIV/AIDS epidemic in our own backyards must be met with an even greater sense of commitment, purpose, and urgency by affected individuals, communities, and by the nation as a whole”.

Well, Kid In The Attic, that’s what’s going on in my world today.

I hope your generation has more common sense than mine.

Good luck.

John Cowart