A word about health. MY health.

 Think I’m afraid of something called 19? Guess again.

Sorry. Not afraid of this thing. Have I been vaccinated? Yes. Over the years, many times. DPT, Polio, Small Pox, Typhoid, and a couple tetanus boosters due to rusty nails and such. I have not lived a risk free life. Never got a flu shot, never got the flu. Haven’t been to a doctor for illness in my adult life, only stitches (14 by last count). Haven’t been hospitalized since the age of three, when they took my tonsils out and lied to me about an ice cream reward in exchange for the ether trip. Apple sauce was all I got. I’m 68. Ever since, I have had this rule, not a superstition but a rule. Stay away from the medical system. Once they get you, they got you. They got my grandparents, all four of whom died in the Salem Hospital where I was born and expect one day to die myself. They got both my parents, though my dad escaped partially; having been born at the Salem Hospital, he did not die there but on a fancy motorized bed borrowed from the Salem Hospital. He had a whole bunch of morphine too. They called it lung cancer. I called it, “They finally caught up with you, the medical system.”

Many times my wife and I have made a joke about the constant television ads showing happy people taking polysyllabic drugs while the streaming chyron warns of side effects including everything from drowsy eyeball to sudden drop-dead-itis. I understand when the drug being peddled is for psoriasis (fate worse than death) or advanced forms of facial cancer (sentence of death cruelly withheld by fate), and of course, Restless Leg Syndrome.

So. I’m at a loss during this new federal government invasion into my life or what remains of it. I don’t want to hurt any of you out there. Actually, I rarely go out amongst you all, maybe once a week. I wear a mask for three minutes each time, when I buy cigarettes in Delaware from a mask-wearing buddy whose faces we haven’t seen each other of in a whole year. I wear the mask because he has to. None of the other customers is “wearing,” if I may coin a term. It’s good manners on my part, learned in childhood from my mother. Same at the ATM. If anyone in line is “wearing,” I do too. If they’re not, we just do our usual thing of trying to strangle some cash from the machine.

Guess I’ve backed my way into my own health position and my own personal VAX rule. I will be “wearing” — when I am — only as a matter of strictly personal courtesy to you and other utter strangers whom I do not wish to offend. I’ve done the math most of you haven’t done or don’t know how to. The mortality rate of this thing is (to use an actual math term) “in the limit, approaching zero.” How so many of you can be so terrified has puzzled me from Day One of the initial Pandemic Panic. As to the vaccine Trump moved heaven and earth to procure for us, bless his heart, I don’t need it, don’t want it, and won’t have it. This is not a political statement. It’s a longevity strategy. Mine. I will keep living as long as I can keep the damn doctors away from this old body. So keep your hands off.