LOIS GREENE STONE - MASKED MESSAGING

​Lois Greene Stone, writer and poet, has been syndicated worldwide. Poetry and personal essays have been included in hard & softcover book anthologies.  Collections of her personal items/ photos/ memorabilia are in major museums including twelve different divisions of The Smithsonian.  The Smithsonian selected her photo to represent all teens from a specific decade.

​Masked Messaging

​You won a prize: a trip to London!  Oh my gosh; you entered that contest ages and ages ago, and the award just came through.  How totally great.  Must be claimed how?  Phone is just fine to get information?  But, you say, the call is ‘outsourced’ and you can’t quite understand the speaker’s accent?  Well, figure it out!  This is just sensational news.
 
Details: travel must start by end of this month or prize voided.  Okay.  Get hold of the airlines!  Hm, to get to London requires plane changes from your town just to get to the city that goes across the Atlantic Ocean.  The state borders are restricting incoming traffic.  Geez.  Find another route.  Maybe you can drive across state lines to get to the air-field.  Yeah, the drive may take a couple of days but this trip, all expenses paid, is your ‘dream come true’.
 
What did the plane reservation’s operator say?  London will not accept admission of foreign travelers yet?  Can’t be.  Well, fly to France or ‘whatever’ and drive to London.  Oh.  That means you have to pay airfare.  Didn’t think of that problem.  Can’t this prize be extended to when you can enter England?  Isn’t there a ‘small print’ for this whole thing because of the stupid virus?  Yeah, The virus isn’t stupid, just the people who think nothing can happen specifically to them are stupid.
 
Of course I prefer ‘gone viral’ to mean what it is supposed to mean: everyone everywhere can see what’s been posted online!  That’s the viral I like.  So how’d they come up with the word ‘virus’ to indicate something else?
 
We just have to figure out how you can have your all-expenses paid trip to “London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down; London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady.”  Of course I played that game in the elementary school yard during recess.  Didn’t everybody?  No.  I never thought it had meaning.  Has to do with repairing the structure?  You’re kidding.  A nursery rhyme is, well, a nursery rhyme.  Little children don’t even know what a bridge is!  “Ring around the Rosie” means what?  You definitely are not serious.  The Black Death. The rosy rash showed you had the plague, and the posies smelled over the scent of decaying flesh.  Yuk.  Now you want to ruin “Mary, Mary Quite Contrary” with the person being Henry VIII’s daughter and her brother Edward VI, and she couldn’t reverse ecclesiastical changes!  Stop.  I like the sing-song nursery rhymes and want to pretend each is about nothing.  How can I sing them out loud ever again now that you’ve put these images in my head.
 
All right.  Enter another contest like this, and hope, if you do win it in about five years as it seems this one took almost that long, it’ll be like ‘ring around the rosie’ Black Plague and, back in the 14th century, it took four years of what we now call safe-distancing and it went away.