By way of introduction
Starting a new blog series is always a touch daunting.
A few weeks ago, while backing up my files to safeguard them from the disastrous Windows 10 Update 1809, I watched thumbnails of my photos sailing by and thought, “I do a lot of cool things that I hardly ever share about.”
(Full disclosure: I also take a lot of burst photos of this fuzzy muffin.)
The most interesting cat in the world.
I considered doing a throwback series, but the more I thought about it, the less I liked the idea. It needed… something.
The idea of tying in books came separately. A handful of memories surfaced while I perused my bookcase the other day. So many books have become mementos to me–of what was happening in my life when I read them, of the people around me, and of the person I was (and still am) becoming.
For bonus points, I can shuffle in some of those cool photos I wanted to share, too.
So here we are. Welcome to my bookish memories.
Cue the wavy lines
You probably recall that last year’s flu season was horrendous. (And I’m hearing that this year is tracking to be even worse.) Even so, as of January of this year, neither my husband nor I had gotten a flu shot.
In my case, this was just an oversight. I always get a flu shot. You can argue about how the vaccine is just scientists’ best guess and how it’s sometimes not effective–indeed, last year’s vaccine was considered a bad batch–and I will listen politely and still go get my flu shot, because of Thanksgiving 2002 in New York. Consider yourself spared from that story.
At any rate, Michael caught the flu. Not the worst, deadliest strain, and not the least-bad strain, but the one in the middle, which was plenty bad enough. He was out of work for two weeks, and in almost twelve years, I’ve never seen him so sick.
Sometimes sharing isn’t caring.
I didn’t want to get sick. He didn’t want me to get sick. We slept in separate rooms and bought more Lysol products than we needed and prayed. And I went to a drugstore clinic for my flu shot.
It took five big hours to be seen. There were no available chairs. I sat cross-legged on the floor of the drugstore–in the diaper aisle, if I recall correctly–and waited for my name to flash on the screen. In the mean time, I tried not to breathe too much, on the off chance that I could avoid any germs that hadn’t already managed to stick to me. For five hours.
Glad I brought a book.
Five hours with nothing to do but read. It wasn’t quite the bliss it sounds like.
How long is a season, anyway?
The House on Foster Hill by Jaime Jo Wright is a time-slip novel about a creepy house, and that’s enough for me. (Of course it is.) To be honest, I didn’t get a lot of reading done in those five hours, but I was glad to have another world to flit around in when this one was decidedly ick.
My turn came eventually, although it crossed my mind that they might just close up for the day without accommodating everyone on the list. I explained the circumstances to the nurse practitioner, who gave me both a flu shot and a Tamiflu prescription. Then I waited some more for that. And by the way, my final bill for services rendered that day arrived no sooner than August, more than six months after the fact.
Now that’s a long wait time.
Thanks for reading! In a couple weeks I’ll share a bookish memory of what stands between a booklover and the promise of books and chocolate… and what it takes to overcome it.
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