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nhmagazine.com | May 2021
V for Vaccination It felt a little anticlimactic when, after standing in a cold line outside Concord’s Steeplegate Mall for a half-hour and then winding around a Space-Mountain-length indoor queue for an hour, I got my shot.
I
looping around downtown in a car with a t was my second dose, so I was done. I big Trump 2024 banner in the slipstream. needed to wait a couple of weeks before The reactions ranging from outright disdain going crazy and mingling with strangto smiles and polite fist pumps revealed the ers, but the die was cast. After a year of hardened stances of the two sides that seems imagining little fuzzy death agents swirling to have been baked from American clay into about in every square yard of air, I was vacred and blue ceramic tiles of partisanship. cinated and able to breathe free and not die. My subdued reaction to my own vaccinaTo be honest, I was never that worried. tion came to mind and I had an inkling of Call me stoic or foolish, my attitude toward why my second jab hadn’t given me the kind vast, invisible dangers, like pandemics, space of relief it should have. When the country is alien invasions and political idiocy (of any as divided as ours is, how do you know when party or movement) is a bit fatalistic. There’s you win? We all know that a win for only half only so much you can do. the country isn’t a true victory, and yet now it The next day I did what I do just about every seems like that’s the best we can expect. day: I walked the dog. As I strolled around Since the Korean War, American military my Concord neighborhood and down to the victories have all come with asterisks, and Statehouse (our usual route), I began replaying cultural progress itself seems to require a the scenes I had experienced dogwalking just fitful lurching back and forth just to move a year prior (Could it have been so long ago? things a notch ahead. Achievements we Could it have been that recently?) when the thought were established, like civil rights and gravity of the virus and expanse of the quaranending institutionalized prejudice, are all tine measures were just becoming clear. back up for debate and still able to engender More people were wearing masks, even hostility between groups and individuals. some while walking or biking outdoors. Maybe we’ve all just forgotten how to Pedestrians have learned the subtle signals react when we really, unreservedly win at that dictate which party should take the sidesomething. And that’s what the vaccine has walk and which should hug the curb of the been, a big victory for the future, created in road as they pass and give each other a little one presidential administration and fulfilled wave and a grunt of acknowledgement. in another. That seems like an unreservedly Many of my neighbors’ home improvegood thing whether we’re returning to norments I’d noticed popping up like spring malcy or advancing to reinvent the world. daffodils last year were still looking good, The dog and I walked up to the Statehouse and so many of the creative responses to the and stopped to commune with the statue of COVID-19 lockdowns and Zoom school Daniel Webster, a man for whom national unity sessions are still in evidence. One of my was an operating principle. Webster’s politics favorites is the proliferation of painted rocks would probably not hold up well under today’s bearing inspiring (or sometimes just plain scrutiny, but his reply to the question “How weird) messages left in odd spots where they stands the union?” still reverberates: “Rockmight be discovered by passersby. bottomed and copper-sheathed, ” he exclaims. There are other bits of hard evidence of “And soon, vaccinated, ” I add, victoriously. the changes we’ve all endured, but many are contained in the hearts of those who have suffered through it together. The clearest evidence of this came from the some folks
photo by bruce richards
“My Mom said she wanted to live at home forever. Her hospital case manager recommended 360 SHS.”
