You just might find you get what you need

Picture for a moment a giant sports stadium parking lot, one you’ve been to for Dodger games and concerts and events in happier times, converted into a mass vaccine center at the beginning of the end of a worldwide pandemic that’s claimed millions of lives. Gone are the packed parking spaces and tailgate parties; now it is just an endless maze of orange cones stretching towards lines of cars with PPE-dressed people leaning into driver’s side windows with clipboards. Picture coming over a hill to see this unfold before you in the bright morning light as the opening choir strains of You Can’t Always Get What You Want plays from your car. In just a few minutes you will erase the terror of dying from or being hospitalized and permanently harmed by Covid-19. Your children will not be left motherless by this thing. You will survive. Unlike many others - you made it.

I took a moment as I waited the required fifteen minutes after the shot to bow my head and think of those who weren’t, and won’t be, so lucky. People drawing their last tortured breaths in Brazilian hospitals or Michigan trailer homes; people who tested positive today, with the vaccine just a kiss away. I said before it’s like surviving combat for years and then being killed in the final brutal days of the war. So close. So close. Oh, I sobbed for them. The people who didn’t make it. Almost all of them would still be here today, otherwise. 

For a minute I was self-conscious, but then I figured the vaccine site workers are no doubt used to this outpouring of emotion. Most people have told me they had a similar reaction. How could you not??

My “freedom day” is May 19th, two weeks after my second shot. I talked to my vaccinated sister about visiting in June. We haven’t seen her for a year and a half. Saturday I have lunch with my book club (outdoors of course). In May I go to my first small outdoor jazz concert put on by one of our trombone players. It’s going to feel like this was all a bad dream. I wish none of it had ever happened. But for this moment, I am on my way to being safe. And for that I am profoundly grateful. 

You can’t always get what you want

You can’t always get what you want

You can’t always get what you want

But if you try sometimes, you find

You get what you need