Olla Fitzgerald

August 1, 2024

I just got over COVID, again. It lasted two weeks. I can’t imagine how many times I’ve had the flu. It must be at least fifty or more. However, I do know I’ve had COVID five times because I have three daughters that dote on me when I am sick. “Dad,” they say, “COVID can kill you.” I never shun affection in any form and so I go along with it under protest.

They said if you got vaccinated you couldn’t get COVID or give it to others but that was bullshit. They said if you got COVID the antibodies were actually more effective than vaccines. But that turned out to be bullshit, too. At any rate I never got vaccinated to the horror of my kids, probably because I’m stubborn. So, I got COVID anyway; once deliberately because I was curious to know if it was as bad as they said it was, and frankly, they were right. It was pretty bad. The worst I think was Omicron.

When I was a boy there was no such thing as hair-pulling about getting a cold. “Healthcare” had a name. It was Doctor Coots. He came to our house with a black bag and a stethoscope, put his cool hands on my throat seeking arcane information by his gentle touch and thumped my chest and back with a stiff index finger. The thermometer was next while holding a pocket watch in the palm of his hand as we both listened to the ticking of an excruciatingly endless full minute. Then ceremoniously, he studied the red line in the thin glass instrument and shook it firmly, tightly between thumb and forefinger. “Keep him in bed for a few days,” he said with a tedious confidence. Occasionally he scribbled an illegible form of code on an officious pad and handed a prescription to my mother.

If something hurt, you took an aspirin. When my sister got chicken pox my mother made us sleep in the same bed until I got it. That way I’d be immune to it when I was older because chicken pox often killed adults. Cures and vaccines were for serious diseases that people usually died of, except polio and smallpox. The best cure for everything was nothing. Doctors were like baseball players, heroes that never made any money. They made a respectable living but they were paid in community respect as much as cash. Often their patients couldn’t pay anything. Ernie Godfrey worked for my grandfather. He had one tooth. He spent all his money on cheap beer and lived in a shack and when he got sick, Dr. Coots took care of him until he died. My grandfather helped out.

I fell out of a tree when I was eight and shattered my left arm. I went to the hospital, got my arm in a cast and spent one night there. No insurance. No angst about not having it. I got pneumonia when I was twelve and I had to stay in the hospital for two weeks. I got at least fifty antibiotic shots in my butt, so many that both butt-cheeks were black and blue and they started giving them to me in my thighs. I got better. It took all summer. No insurance. They sent us a bill, and no one complained.

Over the course of my early life, I broke my nose twice, had about a hundred stitches everywhere from my chin (diving into the kiddie pool) the back of my head (fist fight) upper lip (playing soccer), stitches in my right hand (dog fight), severely gashed eye socket (running on cut stone steps in the rain), three broken fingers (go-cart crash), and various sports injuries plus a few others.

Every one of my friends growing up spent time in the hospital. Mike Green put his head through a windshield face first and got 450 stitches. He looked like a rag doll but today you’d never know it, maybe just a few lines. Bill Moore ripped his left arm off one summer evening on the St. Lawrence River going 50 MPH in an 8-foot plywood homemade boat. Getting cut, broken bones and sick was normal. It happened.

Some of us didn’t live. Their number came up for whatever reason. It was sad but we went on living knowing we’d all die sooner or later, even as kids. When I was eleven, my cousin Brooks was shooting bottles and cans with some friends in the stone quarry and he shot Gary Lockwood by accident in the head right through the temple and killed him dead on the spot.

Gary was goofing around, and he stepped right into the line of fire. I was fishing with some friends on our dock across the street when it happened. They carried his body down the hill across the hay fields onto a dirt road between the dairy cattle and an apple orchard to the farmhouse where his mother was having lunch with my Aunt Jane. That was a bad day.

We never forgot it or Gary. My Dad took Brooks to a Yankee game and talked to him man to man about life in the army and World War II. I asked him about it when they got home and he cried which was ok if you’re twelve and you kill your friend. We never talked about Gary again after that. A week later we combed our hair with Brylcreem like the Everly Brothers and went to the town dance together. Brooks won the state championship in wrestling that year.

Olla Fitzgerald lived to be a hundred. She used to bring us warm donuts in a brown paper bag with cold lemonade on hot days bailing hay for her husband, Louie, for .25 cents an hour. I wish I had her obituary to reprint here now. I don’t think she ever wanted anything she didn’t have, other than her son coming home from the war in Viet Nam and he did.

There was never any way of knowing when someone was going to die. Like Olla being 100. She came to visit and meet my wife when we were married saying things like, when I was a little boy I did this and that, eyes aglitter with life, purple hair and rouge on her cheeks. They sat on the sofa, ankles crossed chatting like ladies, my wife so young and lovely and Olla like a setting summer sun. I knew her days were short. She was frail. But my grandmother smoked a pack a day and drank a stiff Bloody Mary at lunch for seventy years. Then she had several more all day and a couple of Martinis at night. She lived to be 91.

And I haven’t gotten the flu in five years. Just COVID, but I’m getting used to it. Funny how that is.