My son, Porter, said his teacher put on a bit of a tinfoil hat when he claimed that an underpaid worker in a Wuhan, China research lab secretly sold infected bats to the Wuhan Live Animal Market, considered ground zero for the Covid-19 pandemic. “Tinfoil Hat” has become our name for a conspiracy theory, and even seventeen-year-old Porter asserts that we all put them on from time to time. Given that we’ve debated the official accounts of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination for over half a century, we should probably own it’s true. We feel entitled to a certain allotment of information, and when we feel deprived, it seems to be human nature to fill the void by sending forth a hydra of words with its million licking tongues to coat us all in spittle and goo. I have to admit, I have a couple of tinfoil hats myself, buried in the shameful corner of my closet, behind some ugly shoes and an old sweater that has fallen off the hanger.

My grandfather, Fred V. Porter, wasn’t much for tinfoil hats. He was a highly educated man with a thrift for words as though they must be spent lightly and with careful accounting. One day as a young teen I was sitting on the floor next to his chair, and he turned to me with a smile and a twinkle in his green eyes. “I like you,” he said. It was the grandest display of affection I would ever have from my grandfather, yet never at any moment did I question whether he loved me. The information had simply bonded to the oxygen, and that was good enough for both of us.

He was born in 1908, and in his autobiography wrote this account of the Spanish flu:

By the time I was rated as a sixth grader . . . the war was over, Jack Dempsey was the greatest man in the world, and the first radios for home use were coming out. The radios worked very poorly and were quite a mess of batteries, speakers, etc. An epidemic called “Spanish influenza” swept the country and many people died therefrom. We got it and all survived but I was down with a high fever for two weeks. I don’t think I’d ever been sick enough previous to that time, to go to bed.

Did you see that? The end of World War I, heavyweight boxing champion Jack Dempsey, the advent of home radios, and the Spanish flu in ninety-three words. At least I have those ninety-three words, and the last forty-six tell me something about my own situation. Grandpa Porter lived in the back of beyond in rural Idaho, no electricity, and most people plowed and traveled by horse. Orla, Idaho was so far in the sticks that he, himself, would later be responsible for bringing electricity to his community during World War II. Yet the Spanish flu reached its curling fingernails through exotic locales in Asia, Europe, and Africa, and infiltrated a sleepy little Idaho farming town to infect my grandfather’s family, and make him the sickest he probably ever was until he contracted cancer in his seventies. There was nowhere to run, and he dealt with it the way he dealt with everything in his life, by looking it straight in the eye and getting on with things. Read More