Yesterday my beloved editor Brenda Copeland asked me if I had gotten a flu shot yet. “No, no,” I replied,  ”I never get the flu shot.  Never get sick, really.”

But instead of feeling the surge of self-satisfaction that I was anticipating, I was, instead, stricken with a case of bad deja vu.  I recalled a blog entry that I wrote last year about the flu shot which I have just retrieved so that I can reprint it below:

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I’ll be fine, really

I just finished an email conversation with a very good friend who was one of the first people on the scene at the Sandy Hook shooting on Friday. Sandy Hook, in Newtown, is just a few miles down the road from our town and three 1st responders from my ambulance crew were there.   When my friend first entered the building, he was with another friend who is a State Trooper.  They didn’t even know that it was a shooting scene. They had no idea what they were about to witness.  Now, sadly, we all know what they found.

Sunday was the annual Tractor Parade here in Roxbury Connecticut and it ended up being a perfect day for a parade.. I would share the history of the parade, but I don’t know it. Nor does anybody else I have asked, and there’s not much available on the internet about this beloved Roxbury tradition.  I recall that it was once part of something called “Old Roxbury Days” and now it’s simply a parade. But what’s great about it is that almost everybody in the area who has a tractor enters it in the parade. Some tractors are wonderful antiques, some are massive hay-baling machines and some are riding lawn-mowers that are brand new.  If it’s a machine that you can ride, you can be in the parade.