Friday Hania and I got jabbed. We left for Holiday Park around 11:45 and joined the line of cars on the road into the entrance. It moved fairly quickly, making me think we might make our 12:15 appointments, but then we made a right in front of the War Memorial (where we had once watched, surreally, the whirling dervishes) and saw a field of cars sitting in a concatenation of loops. After about 15 minutes, a man approached, found our names on his list, and scrawled what looked like a V in blue on the windshield. We then entered the loop closest to the tennis center (which seemed pretty empty, accessible, I assumed, only by bike or on foot).
Here movement was a lot less swift. We’d sit for five minutes or more. I read The Spectator on my iPad and listened to Symphony Hall until I decided to turn the engine off while waiting for the next small advance. After the second turn, the car in front of the one in front of us broke down, and cones had to be moved so everyone could get around it.
The first hour passed. Then the second. I was surprised that nobody else seemed to be reading, especially since the place was filled with Boomers who had grown up in the pre-video age. We were the automobile generation, and while the shapes had become much less fanciful than in our youth we appreciated having a shell to sit in, air-conditioned and protected from the sun. It also provided music - at least when the engine was running - and a modicum of privacy.
Finally, we got within sight of the end. A woman zapped our bar codes (having to do mine several times before it took) and more strange symbols, now in red, were scribbled on our windshield. We were directed to drive in front of the War Memorial – fittingly, as the entire operation had a whiff of the military about it – and then we followed one other car in a coned circle to the side, until we came back to the main road. Here we waited to be told which tent to proceed to.
It was #5. A young man in scrubs asked us a few questions about allergies and medications, and then we sat some more. They were waiting, he said, for the delivery of the vaccine. When it came, a young nurse put it in a needle which she then inserted into my arm. With another needle, she walked around to the passenger side and did the same to Hania. Neither of us took a picture of the other person getting jabbed, though there seemed a strange sense of bonding in the moment, a kind of medical marital cohesiveness. (Which I probably wouldn't have felt if I'd taken a picture.)
It was now a little past 3. We had waited a little over three hours. We drove to another off-road area, the last, where we waited in case we experienced any adverse reactions. Members of the Fort Lauderdale and Pompano Beach Fire Rescue squads stood ready in the event that somebody did.
After fifteen minutes we were free to go. We drove to the Riverside Hotel and toasted our accomplishment with cocktails.
Yesterday I made my semi-annual visit to Bascom Palmer in Miami. Monday I had visited a sports medicine doctor and been given a boot to wear on my left leg for Achilles tendinitis and a strained calf muscle, and I felt a little odd limping with a boot into an eye institute.
A lovely technician from Cuba checked my ocular pressure and then dilated my pupils for the Ocular Coherence Tomography. Back in the waiting room, now unable to read, I watched a soap opera on the TV. A commercial came one, the one that uses Edith Piaf’s Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, and a Haitian woman with a beautiful voice sang along. And it occurred to me that patient singalongs would help pass the time while waiting to see doctors. They might even motivate the doctors to see us sooner. Perhaps when the pandemic’s over.
I like the British word for health care professionals who administer vaccines: jabbers.
And throughout the land, the political signs gave way to holiday lights.
When I was an ESL teacher I loved teaching those rules of grammar that had logical explanations – like countables and uncountables. You can’t count money, I would tell my students, but you can count dollars, so you say “I don’t have much money” or “I don’t have many dollars.” The same with water and, for example, puddles. “Last week there was too much water in our neighborhood.” “Last week there were too many puddles in our neighborhood.” It would never occur to a native speaker to say “too much puddles.”
Or would it? Yesterday I read the opening paragraph on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. The reviewer, a distinguished author, wrote: “The waves come at us. We are now being hit with the third wave of case numbers in the Covid-19 tsunami and the first wave of books about it. There will be more, much more, of both.”
“MANY MORE!!!!” I shouted from my armchair. Then I thought of all the hours I had spent drilling the countables and uncountables rule into students who, if somehow they read this paragraph, would wonder what I had been teaching them.
I was greatly relieved to learn that Steve Martin - comedian, actor, novelist, banjo player - doesn't actually draw the cartoons that he's now publishing.