photograph by CDC / unsplash
Another cluster of cars processes up the ramp and files into orderly lanes. We can fit about a dozen per lane, per cluster. We volunteers have pre-filled stacks of vaccination record cards with certain basic information: our location (Pipkin), the vaccine being administered that day (Pfizer) and its lot number, today’s date, and the date folks ought to return for their second shot.
Once the drivers have glided their vehicles to a halt, we approach each one, first making sure the cars are in park and the engines off (we don’t need them slamming into us or each other, and we don’t need any extra exhaust fumes). Then, if a car contains multiple folks, we ascertain who’s getting vaccinated today, and begin filling out more paperwork, completing their vaccine cards, checking to see what questions they may have, asking which arm they would like to present for the injection. Each car brings its own atmosphere. Some people are here in groups, with spouses or children or siblings, and it feels like a party. Others, solo, are businesslike, or nervous, or chatty. Most everyone seems very, very glad to be here.
After a nurse has jabbed a hypodermic needle into my arm and I’ve been directed to drive outside for a 15-minute waiting period, I realize I’m weeping and grinning behind the wheel of my car. Hope and relief and exhaustion, a heady mix, combine and flood my consciousness all at once. I’m very, very glad to be here; it’s been a very, very long year.
At the end of the shift, someone says we’ve vaccinated about 1,200 people that day. My feet are sore from standing on concrete, and I’ve worked only a half-day, from 1:00 until about 5:45. The nurse who has been leading the station I’ve worked this afternoon has dropped all of her syringe caps, all day long, into her white lab coat’s deep pockets. She flips her pockets out onto a folding table and begins to count. She does this count every day, she tells me. She likes to keep track. Like so many of the people who have been working to keep the rest of us safer, she spends most of her time focused on what needs doing right now. But alongside the immediate needs is an awareness that these days will be imprinted in our memories for a long, long time. Toward the end of the afternoon, someone asks if I would like to get vaccinated myself. Absolutely I would. I drive home elated.
Three weeks later, I’m back at the Pipkin Building, this time entering the queue of cars myself to receive my second dose. Oversized electronic signs on East Parkway say to be in the line an hour early, but, unaware, I’m arriving just 20 minutes before my 9:00 appointment, and briefly panic that I’ll be turned away — but everything goes smoothly. (After the past 14 months, the concept of “everything going smoothly” feels implausible, unfamiliar.) Seeing the process from within my own vehicle (off and in park, thank you) is humbling, awe-inspiring. After a nurse has jabbed a hypodermic needle into my arm and I’ve been directed to drive outside for a 15-minute waiting period, I realize I’m weeping and grinning behind the wheel of my car. Hope and relief and exhaustion, a heady mix, combine and flood my consciousness all at once. I’m very, very glad to be here; it’s been a very, very long year.
In 38 of the 50 states, including Tennessee, everyone aged 16 and above is eligible to receive the vaccine. For nearly everyone, there is no reason not to get a shot. These vaccines are the result of rigorous, thorough science, but to me, they feel as much like miracles as anything. They’re safe. They’re available in mass quantities. And they work. The Pipkin Building is now a federally run facility, offering even more doses each day.
Pandemic time has been tough to track (Chris McCoy talks more about that haziness in his essay at the end of this magazine). Spinning in a weird temporal vortex, where March 2020 seemed to persist for about 11 months, it can be easy to lose sight of how far we’ve come. But we have come so far, with so much thanks owed to so many. The proof is in the syringes. As of this writing, nearly 60 percent of the folks who work at Contemporary Media, which publishes this magazine, are fully vaccinated, and another 20 percent have received first doses and are awaiting their second. We get to interact as real, live humans again, not just disembodied heads bobbing around on Zoom screens.
When the night has been very dark, we sometimes doubt the dawn, when it comes. Could that really be the sun, or merely another shade of gray? We’ve been in a disorienting darkness for some time now, but our eyes are not playing tricks on us: Yes, the brightness on the horizon is real.
