Day 273, December 14, 2020
Vaccination Day
This morning, The New York Times tells us, at 9 am, in Long Island Jewish Medical Center, the hospital where my brother works, the first person in the US (outside of the vaccine trials) was given the Covid-19 vaccine. I wonder if we will look back at this as the beginning of the end of the pandemic. Granted, it may take a very long time for vaccine supplies to filter down through the healthcare workers, the elderly in nursing homes, and all the other high risk individuals and essential workers before it reaches the rest of the general population, but nevertheless it is a bright note in a concerning moment where even the rural communities in Western Massachusetts are seeing a resurgence that have shut public offices, caused restaurants to pivot again, and moved grade schools back online.
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| That's Franklin. |
I was talking with a colleague this morning and she talked about how what just a few weeks ago felt like an abstract thing that we read about in the news, is now viscerally present in our towns, impacting our neighbors, and families. The University of Massachusetts has opened its testing site to the general public, and I understand Greenfield Community College will also become a testing site. It is good to see that we are finally getting the kinds of resources needed to hopefully help catch transmissions early.
I was thinking about the polio (or maybe it was smallpox) vaccine and the welt of a scar that it left on my shoulder and the shoulders of generation of people. And I remember having chickenpox and having to stay inside while my friends played outside my window. I don't remember the illness at all except for the admonitions to stop itching. I still have a few scars from that childhood illness.
My own kids grew up after the advent of the chickenpox vaccine. It seems surprising that such a staple of my own childhood experience and all the other kids I knew, so quietly slipped into the annals of history. Though, one of my kids did somehow manage to acquire chickenpox, it seems to have mostly disappeared from general consciousness... except a few of my friends have experienced an outbreak of shingles. That seems like an unfair reprise, though there's a vaccine for that too.
This morning I wrote about how, if this were science fiction, an author might write about an unintended consequence, a side effect of the vaccine that then impacts all of humanity... or one generation of humanity. But who wants to be that author now? I imagine that someone like Ursula K. Le Guin might say that we look to the future to help us learn about the past, and we need that more than ever right now. In a Zoom with one of my daughters, she talked about the lessons from the 1918 flu, and when they saw the most dangerous surge over the fall into winter, and how people saw that at the very beginning.
Rather than the dystopian future visions, I wonder about the utopian visions that could emerge. It seems almost unimaginable given our political, racial, and income divides in the moment. I wonder if we need to retrain ourselves how to dream. It is a crucial asset. Another colleague I spoke with today, talked about how she was trained in a curriculum that helped students to retrain their minds to approach things from a strengths based approach, and the first step in that was retraining one's self to focus on mental health and resilience. She talked about going outside and and thinking about only good things for six minutes. I'm not sure if I remember that correctly, the going outside, and the six minute increment, but it is there in my mind.
That seems like a good place to start. Maybe over time, like going to the gym or riding a bike, one could get better at it and think good things in longer increments. I suppose, to a degree, that is what my dog walks with Franklin are... little meditations that include checking the mail, greeting the chickens, and a short walk through the backyard down to the Sawmill River and back. Franklin is a good model for embodying gleefulness in the joy he exhibits as he bounds down the path chasing imaginary and occasionally actual squirrels. He's also fixated on the treats in my pocket so, any rustle of my arms as if it might be treat time causes great leaps of joy.
I wonder when I may have last experienced that kind of unbridled joy, let alone expressed that unbridled joy. But I guess that is also easy. There are moments playing music when both happen, it is rare, but not as rare as one might think, the moments when something transcends the moment of what should happen into something that could happen. It is like watching Tony Williams playing a drum solo. It is something marvelous. And like Franklin, I get a goofy giddy grin and might also walk or dance with a funny hopping gait. Or, sometimes I feel it in my jaw and fingers, like electricity has been running through my body and I have to shake my hands to release some of the charge. I am not a good enough musician to make it happen all of the time, but I am good enough that it happens some of the time, and those moments make the endeavor worthwhile.
There is something like that while riding a bicycle. Riding out past the Montague Bookmill where the road opens up to fields, early in the morning one might encounter a family of deer at the edge of the woods, race some of the sparrows swooping among the tall grasses, or linger on the pedestrian bridge as a train passes below. There's one stretch on Greenfield Road where at the bottom of a long downhill slope, a radar detecting sign tracks your speed, and I always tried to go as fast as my body could propel myself on that stretch. It was equivalent to Franklin's wild and gleeful romp, where in top gear I would spin out at what my phone says was 29 or 30 miles an hour. I'm not sure I could ever get the sign to register over 27 or 28, but the most marvelous sensation was not that moment of top speed, but the moment after when I let up and pulled my body out of the deep crouch and rode the glide down to a more gentle and genteel pace. How could one not smile at the effortless glide carries you a delightful distance.
So, I hope you celebrate Vaccine Day by finding a way to channel your inner Franklin.
Take care and be well,
Leo
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| The Sawmill River |
From Our Friends:
From Academics for Black Lives:
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From Inside Higher Ed:
The ABCs of successful advising both before, during and after the pandemic are actually the LRCs: listen, respect and care. That's according to new data from the National Survey of Student Engagement. »
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From EducationAdminWebAdvisor:
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From Diverse Issues in Higher Ed:
Moving from Ally to Accomplice: How Far Are You Willing to Go to Disrupt Racism in the Workplace?
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| It was snowing a little bit today. |
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