Wishful
Thinking
“Everybody
wants a holiday
Everybody
wants to feel the sun
Get
outside and run around
Live
like they’re forever young
Everybody
wants to be beautiful
And
live life in their own way
No
one ever wants to let it go
No
matter what they do or say.”
Jackson
Browne, Leslie Mendelson, Steven McEwan (verse 2, “A Human Touch,” 2019)
Over the weekend, my friend
David said to me, “I need to get into salt water.” I knew exactly what he
meant. Sometimes we all need to get back to the source, back to the salty sea from
whence we came. There is no better medicine, no faster restorer of vitality
than to spend a couple of days on a beach listening to the lapping of waves and
the call of gulls. A saltwater baptism restores us, body and soul.
We’ve endured such a long,
drawn-out period of being land-locked by this pandemic, with no end in sight.
In fact, the hospitals in Birmingham are packed to the gills. Nurses are
beginning to protest; some have staged walk outs, and some have simply quit. I
can’t blame them—they’re way past exhausted and a little hopeless that this
nightmare will ever end.
I’ve noticed that the
isolation brought about by the pandemic has heightened my fantasy life. I have
conversations out loud with non-existent people, talk to Liza more, explaining
things to her dog ears. She looks at me like she understands exactly what I mean. I
spend an hour every day on the telephone with a friend, which is something I
never would have done before. I find myself making up excuses to hang around
friends’ houses, hoping for “a human touch.” It’s pathetic, but I’ll bet I’m
not the only one.
How can we, those of us
who are sheltering in place, help ourselves? How can we preserve our emotional
lives and not sully our souls with resentment of folks who stubbornly refuse to
be vaccinated and who think that masks represent a slap to their freedom? I
realize there are those who cannot, for health reasons, get vaccinated—especially
those who have blood disorders, or are on chemotherapy. But the majority of
anti-vaccine stalwarts are not that; their protest is based upon ideology and I’m
sorry to say, on ignorance of science. In Birmingham, 95% of those hospitalized
with Covid right now are unvaccinated and many of them are children. Yet, when
the UAB-Children’s Hospital physicians met with local school boards to ask, or
rather, to beg them to mandate masks for children under 12, there were people
with signs that read, “Masks are child abuse!” It’s simply bizarre.
And so, those of us who
are vulnerable yearn—for the freedom of going to the beach and getting in the
salt water, of going to a restaurant or a concert or a museum. And we fantasize
and talk out loud and daydream and watch the news with wistful eyes, hoping for
a downturn in cases.
“Everybody wants to be
beautiful, and live life in their own way.” We will only be
able to do that again when we defeat this virus by getting vaccinated. I pray
for that. I hope you do too.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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