This may go into your permanent record.

Welcome to autumn, meteorologically speaking. As far back as I can remember it’s been my favorite season, despite summer’s freedoms being replaced by a return to school. Even that brought the return of school friends barely, if at all, seen for months. Of course, all of this was decades before the complications of schooling during a pandemic like the COVID-19 virus compounded by wildfires, droughts and other concurrent indicators of our climate crises. I’m old enough that I was attending school before the polio vaccine was approved for use. I don’t remember if I received a shot of the Salk vaccine or the orally administered Sabin version, although the latter seems likely since I have vague recollections of summers full of concerns about becoming crippled or ending up in an iron lung. A face mask is far less limiting to my current freedom than experiencing intubation during an ICU stay.

preview of coming attractions: autumn leaves

Photo by J. Harrington

Despite my memory lapses, the reading I’ve been doing recently makes it clear that those opposing vaccination are but the latest incarnations of a tribe that’s been around most likely since the development  of vaccines. And long before that, remember the Salem witch trials? There’s a long and unfortunate history of people being irrational and unreasonable, and wrong, ever since there were people, or at least records about people.

I recently got a booster shot, not for COVID-19 but for tetanus. Why? Because my primary care physicial knows I occasionally play in the dirt and that’s where the bacteria live. Somehow I had acquired the misinformation that tetanus was caused by getting cut by a rusty piece of metal. I had also lost track of getting a prior tetanus booster a decade earlier.

I doubt if I could find a paper trail of which shots I’ve received or when I received them, although I do have a copy of my baptismal certificate, and there’s a bunch of other information scattered about in other  paper files around the house, but organized? complete? not so much. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a copy of my  permanent record? Have you seen  yours?

When the Virus Comes

Angelo Geter

When the virus comes,
Talking heads on television screens
will tell you to abandon ship.  
To drown yourself in a sea of isolation.  
Submerge homes in lysol wipes and hand sanitizer.
Engulf body in face mask and plastic glove
until it becomes second nature.

They will tell you to turn your kitchen into a panic room,
basement into fallout shelter.
Instruct you to grab everything you can,
while you still can.
They will say
the shelves at the stores are empty,
and not realize they are also talking about you.

They will preach from the gospel of quarantine.
Shout parables of
“Thou Shalt wash thine hands.”
“For God so loved the world
he socially distanced himself
from the very people he wanted to save.”
It will make you wonder how a hero
or a government
Can rescue someone they can’t even touch.

When the virus comes,
you will kiss your lover like it’s the last time,
because maybe it is.
You will dance on timelines
like decades are stuck on the balls of your feet.
Sing like a quartet is trapped in your throat.
Laugh like this is the last time you know what joy feels like,
because maybe it is.

And today that will be more than enough. 

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Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.