A low, lead-colored sky, snow falling (again) as I drive to Norwalk Hospital for my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. It all goes smoothly, in and out in less than half an hour. A security guard checks my temperature, a nurse hands me a form to fill out, attesting that I’ve had no allergic reactions to injected medications and that I understand what the side effects might be; then I’m escorted to a desk near the main entrance, bare my arm, get the shot, am handed a card testifying that I’ve been vaccinated, following which I wait for 15 minutes in a “recovery” room to make sure I don’t go into anaphylactic shock. The nurses and other medical personnel are wearing masks that say, “I’ve been vaccinated.” I ask for one, figuring it will be a badge of honor; but the masks are for staff only.

So now I’m trying to NOT feel (Choose one): overconfident, bullet-proof, invulnerable.

Leslie is due for  her second shot on March 14, after which we will make our long-delayed hegira to Arizona. A few days ago, her friend Karen’s mother phoned, chocked with grief over her daughter’s death from Covid last spring (See the first of these posts). The call caused Leslie’s sorrow to rise up, and she cried in my arms. Meanwhile, I learned that an old friend of mine, Peter Iseman, died recently of virus-related complications. He and Karen are but two of the half-million Americans who have succumbed to this awful plague; they put a face and a personality on the numbers, they give meaning to the numbing statistics.

Some unrelated, random observations: Yesterday, I tuned into NASA TV to watch the Mars rover, Perseverance, land on the red planet. It made a voyage of 290 million miles in seven months, and touched down in a complicated, fully automated series of maneuvers right on time at 3:55pm EST.  A wondrous, astonishing, heartening event in this otherwise disheartening year, an illustration of what we can do in this country when we pull together.

A few hours later, on the nightly news, I watched a Texas family burning their furniture to keep from freezing to death in the winter storm that’s struck more than half the U.S.  A stunning juxtaposition, wouldn’t you say? A spacecraft landing on Mars to search for signs of life, American citizens setting fire to tables and chairs to stay warm. The misinformation and disinformation that’s been spewed for the past four years hasn’t stopped with the retirement of Donald Trump to Mar-A-Lago. The Texas governor and his cronies, voices amplified by right-wing media, blame the state’s plight on the “failure” of renewable energy sources.  Nevermind that only seven percent of Texas’s energy comes from renewables — The windmills froze! Of course, so did the natural gas pipelines. We must, must do all we can to promote burning the fossil fuels that cause climate change that, in turn, causes events like unprecedented winter storms that force families to repurpose their furniture into firewood.

 

 

 

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