My friend Ralph, now a retired journalist, was just a little boy playing with toy cars by the window the day a shabby, stooped man came trudging up the walkway carrying a lumpy grocery bag.
It was biting cold, maybe late February or early March, and an icy snow was hard on the wind-swept Pennsylvania hillside. That was where Ralph lived in a tiny, tidy house run efficiently by his long-widowed, no-nonsense grandmother. It was because of her that Ralph took a particular interest in the vagrant approaching the front door: She would make short work of him, and Ralph didn’t want to miss the drama.
It’s not that she was a hard woman. “Formidable” described her better, Ralph remembered. Having raised four children on her own at a time when there were no government checks to fall back on, she had neither the time nor the money to waste on salesmen or peddlers.
Buffeted by swirling clouds of ice, the old man paused to tug at the brim of a tattered fedora that was threatening to fly off his head. Against the gusts, he gathered the collar of his coat tight around his neck. There were safety pins holding the overcoat closed where buttons were missing.
The man finally knocked at the door, and Ralph could hear his grandmother’s footsteps. She opened the door. With the bitter wind whistling in the hall, Ralph couldn’t make out what the man was saying. But, wind or no wind, his grandmother’s voice was clear and strong.
“No, thank you,” she said. “I’m not interested.” But, just when he expected the door to punctuate the end of their conversation, his grandmother said something that surprised Ralph: “Why don’t you come out of the cold?”
She sat him down at the kitchen table. “You could smell the poor old guy,” my friend remembered. But soon, the kitchen was filled, instead, with the smell of coffee. Ralph didn’t know what made his grandmother take pity on the man, but what happened next was even more astounding.
“Do you have kin?” she asked, by way of small talk.
“My wife died in that flu.”
Ralph didn’t know what “that flu” meant, but he said the mention of it had a profound effect on his grandmother. “Her countenance changed.” She told the man she would take two of the “resurrection plants” he was selling. He dug into his grocery bag and pulled out half a dozen of the things. Each was a tight ball of desiccated desert moss the size of an orange, a little brown tumbleweed that looked dead as dead could be. The man himself came to life now, explaining with enthusiasm and animation how, if you put the seemingly dead plant in a bowl of water, overnight, it would come to bright-green life.
Ralph’s grandmother disappeared into the larder, where she kept the old coffee can with the household savings. Ralph expected her to return with some nickels or a dime — resurrection plants weren’t worth much of anything other than giving someone down on his luck something to sell so he wouldn’t be a beggar. Instead of a dime, she returned with a piece of paper money. Ralph marveled that the paper had the number five in each corner. The man, crestfallen, apologized that he couldn’t sell her his wares as he had no change. Ralph’s grandmother pressed the bill in his hand, took two little tumbleweeds, and walked him to the door. With many smiles and tips of his hat, the man went his way.
That night, when Ralph’s mother came home from work, he quietly asked her, “What’s ‘that flu’?”
“That was the Spanish flu,” she explained. “It’s what killed your grandfather.”
For all the talk about how things will never be the same after COVID-19, the Spanish flu is both an example and a counterexample. On the one hand, after the Spanish flu, the country didn’t sink in gloom but roared into the giddy, go-go ‘20s. But, then again, the pain of loss did persist. Some 30 years and a depression and a world war after the Spanish flu, its memory still had the power to inspire kindness toward those who had suffered.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
