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A Journal of the Plague Year 2021–chapter 198

Thursday, March 4

Emily stirred herself early today and called Walgreens at 7:30 a.m. Her mission: to find out if we could move our vaccine appointments up a week—in order to accord with the recommended interval of three weeks between Pfizer shots—and if not, to see if the First Avenue location, where we are scheduled to go on March 12, will in fact have the Pfizer vaccine. Back in February that branch only had Moderna.

She called the Walgreens head office and—hooray!—actually got a human on the phone, something she spent two-and-a-half fruitless hours trying to do the day before. However—boo! The human in this case was, Emily later reported, the most unhelpful person she’s ever encountered in such a situation.

Could we move up the appointment? Only if we cancelled the existing appointment. “Do you want me to cancel your existing appointment?”

The representative said she’d never heard that the recommended interval between the two Pfizer shots was three weeks as opposed to four. She had handled many calls, she said, and no one else had raised the idea that they’d been scheduled for one of each vaccine.

Will the First Avenue branch actually have the Pfizer vaccine? The customer service rep said she could find that out only by canceling our existing appointment.

So we gained nothing. My current thinking is that we should go back to NYC next Wednesday and immediately go in person to the First Avenue branch of Walgreens to see if they have the Pfizer vaccine. It seems they may not know in advance just what vaccines are being delivered.

(Later in the day, a visit to the Walgreens website showed the First Avenue location as having only the Pfizer vaccine. So, go figure.)

You can see that we worry about all of this almost constantly. Try not to think about it for a while, and in an hour or so, with little else of importance on your mind, your thoughts drift back to the matter of the vaccinations.

The stony indifference, abject profit-seeking, and downright cruelty exhibited in the current case has prompted a memory from my childhood. I always dreaded trips to the pediatrician when I was a child. If you went there with a mere cold, they’d give you a penicillin shot—even though we now know that would have had no effect on a cold. But, hell, they got paid for giving the shot. 

And most punishing of all, the shot-giver was a beefy woman with the scarier-than-Ratched name of Miss Bledsoe!

You could cry—you could shout and scream—but you could not defeat Miss Bledsoe and her five-inch needles destined to put a sanguinary dent into your backside.

Tonight’s dinner: BLT sandwiches, leftover penne with asparagus, and a pear salad.

Entertainment: more of the advertising-rich Hulu’s suspenseful and insightful Apple Tree Yard and of Netflix’ French comedy Call My Agent!

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A Journal of the Plague Year 2021–chapter 196

Wednesday, February 24

Despite rising temperatures, there is still a bit of accumulated snow on eastern Long Island. Last night was clear with a bright moon, and at 1 a.m. the snow-covered back yard glowed like neon.

Two mental hiccups of the current period. When I have something that needs doing—whether paying bills, moving a March doctor’s appointment to a later date, or constructing a mildly demanding dinner—I tend to procrastinate. Tackling any such tasks seems horribly demanding. Better to climb back into bed.

And if there are no such tasks loitering on my mental to-do list, I suffer from a strong feeling that I am being irresponsible. I know that I am supposed to do something—but what is it?

It was somehow easier to do meal planning and a quick grocery shopping in the city. But I longed to be back on Long Island; nature and natural beauty are just closer here, even if cloudy and damp conditions prevail. Today is sunny, and I can hear the sometimes absent birds chirping. In due course, they may even return to the bird feeder. One of the squirrels just scampered up a shrub, jumped onto the roof, and raced around up there, his little footfalls offering percussive amusement to those of us below.

For months, I have relied on the local library for e-books. But while in the city I recovered my New York Public Library card. Now, I can log in to NYPL and draw from their somewhat larger stock of e-books. I have begun reading John Banville’s latest policier, Snow. Mysteriously, the author has published this one under his own name rather than using the pen name of Benjamin Black that he usually employs for his less-serious works. Yet some of the characters seem familiar from his Quirke series, published under the pseudonym. At first, this book seems like a prototypical English country-house mystery—featuring a murder in the library, no less—but I feel sure that the plot will soon turn unconventional.

There is still no prospect of straightening out the Walgreens second-vaccine confusion. Emily has had a telephone conversation with the pharmacy manager at the Walgreens branch where we are due to report on March 12—and they say they may not know just which brand(s) of vaccine that store will have until the week in question. Emily isn’t worried that we’ll be given one each of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines—but that we’ll be denied a second shot altogether.  She’s quite concerned about this—I just divert my mind to other stuff. Now, what’s missing from the grocery list for the Stop & Shop delivery that’s scheduled for Friday?

Dinner: cornbread tamale pie and a green salad.

Entertainment: Episodes of The Sinner and Call My Agent! on Netflix, capped by a viewing of the classic Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.”