I am very quick on the uptake in some things, and not so quick on others, so it can be a bit of a pain when you think you have cracked it, only for, she who knows, to send you frantically searching for escape routes. So here is how the conversations went recently.
When the door-bell rang the dog started barking, and before I could get there, the hall door opened and a man, (I know it was a man even though I didn't see him), set a cardboard parcel down on the hall floor and disappeared. Now we have a procedure in place and Jenny knew what it was. "The package," she tells me, "has to be taken up to the garage to be quarantined." "Too late, I tell her," I have already carried it through to the utility room." I am confused, because she who knows, has explained that the life of the virus depends on where it lands. On cardboard it can keep going for X number of days, and on plastic for XX number of days.
Much later, towards nightfall, a different currier rings the bell and drops a cardboard box just inside the door. Now, of course, I know what to do, but having been awakened by the doorbell I am feeling grumpy, and don't really want to take the package up to the garage, and fortunately, she who knows is understanding, and suggests that I bring the contents, (not the box), through to the kitchen; so I collect the six bottles of prestige wine and carry them through and as instructed, place them in the sink; and by the time I have returned from disposing of the cardboard box, it is all too apparent that, whatever about the past, in this new dispensation a woman's place is in the kitchen: she has made up a potion of 1 part bleach to 50 of water, and is diligently washing the bottles. Later, when I saw that the jug was empty, I asked, "What have you done with the rest of the solution?" the reply was amazing, she had poured it over the bottles collectively, just in case she had missed anything when washing them separately. "We could have used it later," I told her. "No," she replied, "the water has to be hot." "But we could have heated it in the microwave!" Silence.
Now in a time of crisis, I have a way of being helpful, and catching her off guard, and as a means of combating the virus asked, "Do you think we should wipe over the light switches with whiskey? Laughter. And later, "Do you know what, I have just found a new use for chopsticks!" "What's that?" she said from the next room; "switching on and off the lights," I said. "Well then" she said, "you'll contaminate the chopstick."
Now I have a book in front of me that is no laughing matter, but a salutary reminder of times past. It was presented to me at the school prize giving, and I have often wondered, though not at the time, (and as it is a substantial text), if someone was trying to suggest that I might, as we say, "have a vocation" to the priesthood. But neither then, nor since, have I had such an idea. The book set in the early 1600's is about the life of Henry Morse, and subtitled, "Priest of the Plague," nd without turning a page, we can learn a lot from the dust cover.:
"About this book the author writes: "For a long time I have wanted to study the life of what I might call an "ordinary" priest in the seventeenth century. I took a risk, and settled on a man whose name was unknown. As I gathered information about him -- in London, Rome, Liege and elsewhere - I realised how fortunate my first chance choice had been. Henry Morse led me into many fascinating bypaths of seventh-century England: book-smuggling, the London underworld, ecclesiastical feuds, prisons and camp life, the plague, organised blackmail and thuggery.""
And so the narrative continues:
"After he had been twice imprisoned and twice exiled, Henry Morse returned to England in 1633 and worked unsparingly among the plague-stricken poor of London. Again exiled and again returning, he was eventually arrested in Cumberland, shipped from Newcastle to London, and executed at Tyburn in 1645."
In more senses than one, these were fraught time, Charles the I was on the throne, and his wife a Catholic, and Puritans were spreading the word, that the plague was an expression of God's anger at the increasing number of Catholics.
These days, and for good reason, I don't overindulge myself in following the news, but in recent days I heard a man tell of how his wife, a nurse, phoned him from work, crying, and telling him that she couldn't take it any more. And I had the privilege of hearing a doctor, (who I am sure had no more wish to die than the rest of us) face up to, and accept, the reality, that his job might cost him his life.
__________
© Cormac E. McCloskey
HENRY MORSE: Priest of the Plague
Author: Philip Caraman
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