At the grocery store at the end of August in the year of Our Lord 2022, half the shoppers were masked. A few frail old folk, but most were younger — vigorous striding soccer moms and bearded tech dads with the lean look of obsessive runners. Most wore inefficacious cloth masks, too. It was confusing, because earlier in the summer the place had been mask-free. What had I missed?

Ah: This was an upscale store, the prime New York Times demographic, and they’d probably read stories about polio staging a comeback. Well, better auto-swaddle just in case.

That’s how the media phrase it: Polio is staging a comeback, like Elvis in 1968. Polio, long retired, decides to hit the circuit again, works a few small clubs to test the water. Decides whether to use some new material — maybe I’ll cause blindness and rashes? No, stick with the favorites, give ’em what they want. Here’s a little consequence some of you may recall from my early records. It’s called “Withered Limbs.”

When I was a kid we did not fear polio, because it had been conquered. Again, that was the way it was phrased: conquered, as though Jonas Salk in medieval garb had stood atop a heap of empty iron lungs with a sword in one hand, banner snapping in the brisk, clean wind. Smallpox had been conquered, too. Maybe you got chickenpox, but no one worried about that because everyone got it. We worried a little about mumps, which made you swell up so that you looked, well, mumpy. No one ever got a mump, singular. You got it plural, or you didn’t get it at all.

We also worried about lockjaw, because if you stepped on a nail your mouth would slam shut and they would have to use a crowbar to get your teeth open. But there was a shot for that, and you’d already had it. Mom took you to the doctor once a year and the nurse put a railroad spike in your arm, and you got magic protection against nail-transmitted facial immobilization: whew. Also diphtheria, whatever that was. You might have been afraid of scarlet fever, which according to family lore carried off a ten-year-old two generations back. But polio? We were past that.

Good thing, too, because we all knew that polio meant you had to live in a torpedo and watch TV upside down through a mirror.

All of these paled when measured against rabies, which occupied a special place in the cold place where fear pooled. It wasn’t the bite, or the idea that you would suddenly start frothing at the mouth and barking at your sister. It was the shots. Ten shots. In the stomach! Ten shots in the stomach! The more you thought about that, the more you thought you could smoke Old Yeller if it came to it.

The constellation of fears is great in a child’s mind. The recitation above does not include the other looming dooms: random blasting caps left in vacant lots and irreversible blindness from having the fluid at the center of a golf ball squirt into your eyes. The absence of peers tottering around grade school with one leg and dark glasses may have told us these fears were overblown. As with rabies and lockjaw, we put them aside when we aged into a new set of dreads, like nuclear war or, worse, venereal disease.

What seems peculiar about our age is the comfort some find in fear. No — that’s not quite right. The comfort of fearing the proper and approved things.

The people who are masking are not afraid of polio. (Yet.) They are not afraid of monkeypox, because they know it’s mostly confined to a certain set of people who engage in a certain set of actions. Or, as NPR probably puts it: members of the Earth-based species Homo sapiens who were, as a matter of bureaucratic necessity that exists as a remnant of the archaic gender binary, assigned male at birth, and who have engaged in fluid-exchanging interactions with other persons formally declared male, for some inscrutable reason, the moment they popped out of the birth canal.

You mean it’s mostly among gay men?

Sigh. That’s stigmatizing, and it’s not helpful.

Well, it is helpful for gays, if they need to know.

Anyway, suburban moms are not worried about monkeypox. So what is it that got them wearing masks? From my exhaustive research, which consisted of flicking through Reddit threads populated by Covid obsessives, it’s long Covid. Fear of being vaguely blah for decades. Fear of strange symptoms like “itchy fingernails” or “aching hair.” It’s like Epstein-Barr–fibromyalgia–Lyme disease with a soupçon of lupus and a dash of chronic fatigue. Didn’t you hear? A Danish study said 0.9 percent of Covid-infected people suffered from malleable-toenail syndrome, and another 0.3 percent reported “constipation of the elbow” a year after being symptom-free!

I am not a doctor, and I’m sure it’s a real thing that affects some, but it also seems as if “fear of long Covid” is a lame sequel to a popular TV series, like a Walking Dead spinoff.

FDR once said we have nothing to fear but fear itself, one of the more inspirationally tautological utterances in the record books. As it turned out, Fear Itself is capable of consuming your entire mind until its Gollum-like mutterings take on the stentorian tones of authority and your limbs respond with automated movement to the donning of the Fear Shield as you enter a grocery store where the invisible miasma roils from the nostrils and mouths of the unclean. Long Fear Itself, if you wish.