failure to thrive

When infants or children show signs of not growing according to standard projections, "failure to thrive" might be the diagnosis. The cause or causes might be a host of medical, nutritional, biological, genetic, psychosocial, or environmental factors. Sometimes the cause is undetermined. 

In some cases, failure to thrive, or FTT, is attributed to abuse or neglect. 

Some researchers have focused on maternal touch as a contributing factor to FTT. These studies examine mother-infant tactile interactions: their frequency and type (unintentional, intentional, during play, during feeding). In some cases, the mother or child may exhibit an aversion to physical contact.

Failure to thrive.

The term has poetic gravitas, a resonant summons for us to reflect.

In the Age of Coronavirus, will infants, children, adults, including the ill and the elderly, experience failure to thrive? Will our necessary, imposed self-isolations, self-quarantines, add the unintended affliction of FTT? At a minimum, will our severely restricted social interactions, our social distancing, cause human thriving deficit, or HTD?

We are social animals.

I know I am.

I already have a burgeoning case of HTD.

How about you?

And in the bigger picture, from a global standpoint, from a species perspective, how much FTT or HTD can the human race sustain? And for how long?

Oh, the longing for touch, our ardor for human texture, pining for skin and pulse, hungering for hugs and human scent, blood, sweat, and tears, tactile tension and tangible tenderness.

the end of fragrance?

Is it the end of fragrance? Does social distancing stretch the molecular cone of influence that perfumes and allied fragrances emanate? Will future fragrantial formulas need more potency to pierce, ever so gently and invisibly, the social distance bubble? And will new, stronger fragrantical formulations disturb the infinitely delicate harmony that fragrance chords thrive on?

Weighty questions, on International Fragrance Day no less.

And indeed what are the ends of fragrance? Why do we adorn ourselves in such evocative olfactory raiment? To what ends, what purposes?

The coronavirus moment gives us a perfumed pause to ponder answers to these unanswerable questions.

The bride throws the bouquet. The bouquet is caught. The bouquet is portentous, a sign suggesting love and marriage, says the tradition. And what of our personal bouquets, tossed by any one of us at any point on the gender spectrum? What are we to make of our fragrance bouquet?

What do I expect from wearing my signature chords, my inimitable and idiosyncratic bouquet of arranged self scent, sprayed-on or rolled-on eau de parfum or cologne or eau de toilette (typically Tom Ford, if you must know)? Do I expect a compliment, a stranger's jolt of je ne sais quoi, a passport to Dallianceville or amorous abandon? Whatever I have expected or will expect is nuanced by the strictures of social distancing, at least for now.

Picture this: a terminally ill patient in hospice. Her matted hair. His swarthy face, beard growth of five days. Her chipped, unpainted nails. He petitions the volunteer to comb his hair, to shave him. She asks for a perm, gets her nails done. Why? They ain't going nowhere, as Bob Dylan put it. 

It's for dignity. Aesthetics. Pride of ownership. Something incalculable, more solemn or sacred, having no word in our vernacular.

And the same with fragrance.

She puts it on. Wears her favorite, most alluring fragrance. She is quarantined, lives alone, will not leave the house today.

He does the same. He is running low on his favorite fragrance. He applies it anyway, judiciously and jubilantly. Self-isolation permits this. Demands it.

In fragrante delicto.

social distancing vs. social proximating

I have been known to have social distanced. It is not the same as socially distanced. I have known social distancing. I have known social distancing, in its comings and its goings. Have you? Haven't you? The social distancing of snubs and snafus and near-misses. Or near Missus. The social distancing of forays and fumbles, dalliances and disasters. I have known them all. As T.S. Eliot penned it:

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

               So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase

I have known social distancing by any other name. Filed under the names of loneliness, alienation, indifference, rebuff, and buffering. Under the banners of taboo, time, and space. The labels of contagion or conjugation. Felt as intimacy or aridity.

I have socially distanced by one word, one sentence, a single faux pas. 

Haven't you? Have you?

Social distancing.

How about you?

How about us?

I have sung hymns to social distancing.

No one heard them.

Or no one replied.

Social distancing in the key of me, the key of you, the chords of coldness.

We sought the bridge.

They paid the toll.

They crossed the border.

I bridged the gap.

You narrowed the way . . . of distancing's definition, its social cues, its molecular matrix.

And while we're at it, at this safe distance, socially speaking, tell me, what is its opposite?

Social proximating?

As in: "I want to hold your hand . . . if you wash it." Or: "I want to touch your elbow (with my elbow) ..."

Social proximating, as in "Baby, socially proximate with me, babe."

It's a new brave new landscape, a brand-new vernacular.

Hold on.

But keep your distance.

For your good and mine.

For our good. And for the good of others.