You can tell by the date above, what was going on then. And this story, well-written and sad can stand in for a million stories like it. The protagonist's father is in the hospital. A surgery is followed by Covid. His daughters can only visit on Face- time as was so much the case then. It is hard to read this and be taken back to that hopeless time when we didn't know how long a vaccine might be in coming. But it wasn't that long because we believed in science and labs and the scientists working in them. And now we don't. Or at least our government doesn't.
7 comments:
It's definitely the fool-in-chief who doesn't care to pay for anything that doesn't kick back to him, and his lackey in the public unhealthiness department who can't seem to understand why everyone else shouldn't experience at least one brainworm in their lives.
Mine's up...not necessarily a cheerier story (nor occasion) but a sequel of sorts to an SSW a few back...
https://socialistjazz.blogspot.com/2025/07/short-story-wednesday-first-will-be.html
The vaccine is pretty suspect. Here's mine for today: Great English Short Stories:
https://ahotcupofpleasureagain.wordpress.com/2025/07/23/ssw-great-english-short-stories-ed-reginald-hargreaves-and-lewis-melville-1930/
Yeah, big fan of Moore. I've been reading a few 2020/pandemic-set books and stories lately - the latest was Bruce Borgos' THE BLUE HORSE - and have enjoyed reading most of them a lot more than living it back then.
I read the new S. S. Van Dine collection, THE ALMOST PERFECT CRIME: True Crime Featuring Philo Vance, With Other Stories. It was interesting, and actually grew on me somewhat, but Willard Huntington Wright's snobbishness is pretty unbearable here, as it is in the Philo Vance books (I've read only the first of them). The book has a series of 9 true crime cases (Hall-Mills is the most well known) retold by "Vance" to other characters in his series, in an unbearable pretentious "dropping the g's" manner that had me wanting the throw the book across the room. This was followed by 7 short stories originally published in 1916, a decade before the Vance series started, as by "Albert Otis." These feature three crooks led by Harry Franklin, who only robs other crooks who deserve it. Unfortunately, the stories have some of the worst anti-Semitic and other racist stereotypes that leaves a really bad taste, though not all stories are that bad. If you like capers, you might enjoy them. The sheer dated nature - Hawaii in 1916 - makes them interesting.
Overall, though, I wouldn't go out of my way to look for this one.
This sounds like a potent story, Patti. You're right about the difference between the way Covid was handled, and the way things are now....
Having someone dying in a hospital, with no way to visit them, surely was horrific. I am grateful that Phil died before COVID although being alone with Covid, a few months into my widowhood was pretty horrific too. I will never forget watching that man wash down his groceries over and over again.
Not everyone, by any means, in "ethical drug"/pharmaceuticals manufacture is trustworthy, to be sure, but the current US Secretary of Health and Human Services is as self-involved and frankly stupid a fool as our current president...not even a bit of a coincidence.
I have read a few stories by Lorrie Moore from BIRDS OF AMERICA. I had mixed reactions to the stories I read. I did not finish reading them and now I have to find the book so I can do that. A couple of the stories I skipped were related to Christmas and I would like to read them later this year.
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