I am getting over a virus (i)

from the Janitor at the Viet Nam Literature Project

I am getting over a virus. This one is in my lungs.

I have been coughing for a month. I expect to be tired for another month, the course of this illness around here.

It is a common cold. 15 years ago I had an idiopathic one, uncommon, in my liver where we make usable energy in packets to send along in a timely manner.

For a couple weeks there I couldn’t tell a man from a woman. I couldn’t remember my name.

I didn’t know what I was doing. So I started writing, 1 sentence or 2 each day, how I had arrived in the hayloft of a barn with an empty liver and a head full of Viet Nam.

I got back to work. 1 evening I met a woman at the co-op buying milk for my dogs.

She found this essay about my virus and my work online and fell in love with me. I told her to get her head examined.

She did. After a year of that we got together.

After a dozen years of family life I started writing these letters. They are my most consistent and sustained work from Viet Nam since I started in 1976.

I regret missing last week. I anticipate that I may miss more weeks this coming month while I recover the strength to think.

Today I draw your attention to my previous account, old history, not wrong, but no longer as right as I could make it, of how I came to write a Viet Nam letter from North Carolina.

Portrait at All People Soul Food Grill, Hillsborough, North Carolina, © 2007 by Tim Duffy. Link to the essay “I am getting over a virus” here. The second and third and fourth Viet Nam letter on “I am getting over a virus” appeared on February 10 and February 13 and February 16 and February 19, 2024.