Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

Daniel C. Bryant
(though I never heard him say it himself), and he recorded as well
how he roller skated, played football, climbed on a railroad trestle,
collected cigar boxes, kept nighttime vigils in his backyard for
lightning bugs and shooting stars, dug trenches and built model tanks
and “aeroplanes” with Dick and Clifford. Occasionally on a Saturday,
he packed a backpack and took the Anderson Ferry across the Ohio to
Kentucky to explore and picnic in the woods.
One experience he noted in particular detail, as if in anticipation
of a career still fifteen years off, was a week he was sick. Spanish flu he
called it. Many people, of course, had viral influenza at that time—for
six weeks school was closed, public gatherings were restricted, as they
would no doubt be today if the bird flu threat materializes—and from
his symptoms of fever, muscle aches, sore throat and cough, and poor
appetite, I would have to agree with his diagnosis. A bed was made for
him in the front room, he wrote, where he took sweat treatments and
castor oil, Seidlitz Powder, a pink pill and a white pill, magnesia water
and quinine capsules. For his throat pain he gargled and took sprays.
When he had the energy he read his library books, but much of the
time he only napped. The doctor came, nearly every day according to
the entries, to probe and listen and conclude that his young patient
was getting better.
The entry for November 11 is a long one. It tells, after dutiful
recording of weather and symptoms, how church bells rang out, how
guns were fired in the air, how flags waved as crowds of people passed
up the hill outside his window heading for town. From that day on,
as if it had been the virus in a front room in Cincinnati, Ohio, rather
than the Germans in a railroad car in Compiègne, France, that had
surrendered, he began to get better, just as the doctor said he would,
and within a week was back in school, back on the trestle with Dick
and Clifford and the rest of the gang.
In college, before I ever thought of emulating my father and going
into medicine myself, and for no good reason I can remember now,
I majored in French. To improve my speaking and sense of Gallic
culture, I thought it would be beneficial to spend a summer there.
My parents, cautious and patriotic citizens that they were, witness
to many of the early twentieth century’s dangers, including not only
the First but the Second World War, in which my father served,
the Depression, and the scourge of polio as well as influenza, had
reservations about my plan. It was 1959; Algerian terrorists were on
the loose in France. That meant little to me at the time, though in
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