I had an amazing commute today.

With thunderstorms in the forecast for this afternoon, I decided to join the mole people in the underground for the first time in the month or so I've been bicycle-commuting again.  I felt pretty savage, I have to say, having been in the sun every day several hours a day for the last couple of weeks.  Underground, everyone looks shrunken, shriveled, and sickly all year round. 

I did have misgivings, of course.  Especially after hearing Vice President Joe Biden's warnings on the Today Show about steering clear of the subway, but there was a wicked wind whipping up outside when I left the house, and I wasn't sure I wanted to fight it for forty minutes on my ride in, even without the rain.

I grabbed my E. B. White on the way out the door.  White, is of course, the inventor of one of literature's most illustrious swine — Wilbur, from Charlotte's Web. There was an essay in my E.B. White collection entitled "Death of a Pig" I wanted to read again on the subway ride.  I mean, come on. If I'm gonna tempt fate by riding the T in the midst of a swine flu pandemic, why not go all the way and taunt it by reading White's poignant account of the demise of one of his own swine?

Here's a taste:

I discovered... that once having given a pig an enema there is no turning back, no chance of resuming one of life's more stereotyped roles. The pig's lot and mine were inextricably bound now, as though the rubber tube were the silver cord. From then until the time of his death I held the pig steadily in the bowl of my mind; the task of trying to deliver him from his misery became a strong obsession. His suffering soon became the embodiment of all earthly wretchedness. Along toward the end of the afternoon, defeated in physicking, I phoned the veterinary twenty miles away and placed the case formally in his hands. He was full of questions, and when I casually mentioned the dark spots on the pig's back, his voice changed its tone.

"I don't want to scare you," he said, "but when there are spots, erysipelas [an acute streptococcus bacterial infection] has to be considered."

...

"If a pig has erysipolas can he give it to a person?" I asked.

"Yes, he can," replied the vet.

In the midst of this frightful pandemic I think it's important to remember the swine. 

But the amazing thing about both my commute to and from Back Bay today was that no one — and I am not exaggerating here — no one in my car coughed or sneezed the entire trip.  Seriously, I don't think I've ever experienced anything like it before.  Usually people do a good deal of coughing and sneezing on public transit.  I've always suspected that most of it is psychogenic — no physical cause.  Rather, people do it to further insulate themselves when in close contact with strangers.  They're essentially saying: "Stay away!  I'll cough on you!  Keep your distance! I'll sneeze on you!"  Not that they're exactly conscious of their motives. 

This time no one coughed.  No one sneezed.  But, strangely enough, two women took out brushes tangled with hair and brushed out their hair on me.  The first chose, bizarrely, to sit in the one free seat on my side of the car, which happened to be directly to my right, when there were four seats all in a row free and totally uncluttered right across from me.  And if that weren't obnoxious enough, the first thing she did when she wedged herself in was take out the aforesaid brush and start chasing the rats out of that nest of hers, hair and human dander flying everywhere.

The other woman got on at the next stop and did the exact same thing right across from me. 

I think if it weren't for the swine flu hysteria in the air, they both would have been coughing and sneezing up a storm.  But for this brief moment in time, the fear of flu has manifest as a tacit intolerance of those who could be perceived to be spreading it.  People grasp this implicitly, and behave accordingly.  Because even people with psychogenic coughs don't really want to be quarantined, do they? Who would they cough and sneeze on then? They need people around them to cough and sneeze on.  I mean, presumably they don't sit around at home alone coughing and sneezing.  What earthly function could that possibly serve?

At any rate, if I owe my pleasant commute even partly to swine flu, I guess it makes up for all the hysteria the media's whipping up around it. Although I do hope the Dalai Lama recovers.