Dave's Fiction Warehouse

W henever I go to a Wal-Mart to pick up a prescription, I am reminded that what you save there you eventually surrender in dignity. But it happened to be the first place with available appointments for the Covid vaccine, so my vigilant wife arose early and booked it online. When I arrived at the appointed hour, a number of lines had already formed in front of the understaffed pharmacy counter. In the middle were eight chairs arranged in parallel rows, like a pretend bus.  These chairs were supposedly reserved for those who had just gotten the vaccine and were waiting the required 15 minutes to see whether it would kill them or not. But I am a cynical man, and I suspected most of the sitters had been there awhile and were just taking a load off.  The standing lines were comingled with people dropping off prescriptions, or picking up prescriptions, or waiting for the vaccine. No one seemed sure which line was which.  My personal rule of thumb is that whenever there is more ...

I n Barry Levinson's 1990 movie " Avalon ," there's a scene where the aging patriarch sits down in his easy chair in front of the TV.  The camera remains stationary, but there's a slow cross-fade, and at the end of it  we see that several years have passed. The old guy is still in the chair, still watching TV, but he has gotten much, much older.  His golden years have passed without notice into full decrepitude. It's a poignant moment, but also kind of scary.  Over the last year of Covid isolation, I've felt something like that.  Each day is much like another, lived by rote and routine and the occasional Zoom call. Each day I think we're keeping things together pretty well, but at the end of each day I reflect that I'm in the same place I started -- both literally and figuratively. My TV is mostly the computer; my easy chair is this same Herman Miller Aeron I splurged on 17 years ago. Since August I've been flying around in the virtual world of...