The Wilmington News Journal’s contributing columnists are an erudite, amusing group of gentlemen.
Tony and Sue Lamke and I go back decades when, for reasons known only to a higher source, Tony and I were tapped to the Clinton County Foundation. He as President, I as Secretary. We spent the first year trying to unravel the entanglements; the second knitting of the aforementioned into something workable.
Decades passed. After my 10-year hiatus in Cincinnati, I ran into Tony in the Goodwill parking lot.
“Tony! Do you remember me?”
“Do I owe you money?”
He never changes. Tony, Sue and I are now neighbors — how lucky can I be?! I do wonder why he gets to write a column and not me. So, “Nah, nah, na nah … Tony, here goes! (Forget the denials, Tony, of lies, slander, polygraph tests — sorry, readers — an inside joke).
The day of my birth — March 12, 1938 — was the day Hitler annexed Austria, igniting, along with the unsolicited help of Japan, a conflagration resulting in unparalleled known and unknown deaths and the largest global human upheaval and migration to that date.
I will be forever thankful for being born Christian outside of New York City, as opposed to Jewish in Warsaw where, by age four, I would have been on the train to Sobibor.
Fast forward 84 years, and once again the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are thundering down the road in the form of a pathogen too tiny to be seen by the naked eye. The American political body has been as unprepared for this assault as they were for World War II.
I, now a little old lady, am sick of the bungling. Surely America should realize that, without compromise, democracies fail.
The vaccination impasse remains stuck in impasse, including members of my family.
I am a retired nurse. I do remember something. For those unvaccinated working among the vulnerable, shame on you.
A TB bacillus has lodged in the lower left quadrant of my left lung for over 40 years; the hospital where I worked did not warn us of an active TB case. The bacillus is not terribly alarming, unless I end up under a bridge with a blanket and a cup.
Come to think of it, the above-mentioned non-vaccinated remark may just push me there. In the meantime, social isolation has left me so bored that over the weekend I actually polished silver.
Color coding dish cloths may be next.
Ann Kuehn resides at Ohio Living Cape May in Wilmington. She says, “I gravitated to Ohio at age 18 and never left” and moved to Sabina in 1987.
