It ended at a Walgreens in the Upper West Side, a Saturday afternoon, the nicest day to date of New York City's 2021, 63 degrees, the sidewalks something like what they'd once been: teeming.
In front of me in line were a young Asian woman, a middle-aged white woman, and a young Black woman. Behind me was an Asian man with a baby in a stroller.
We handed our paperwork through plexiglass shields to the pharmacist's assistant and took a seat and waited.
A Russian woman came out and called us one-by-one into a make-shift room constructed next to the pharmacy. The Black woman went in first. When she came out, I said, "Congratulations," and she smiled with relief and said, "Thank you." That's when I started to cry.
Next, the Asian woman went in. Her little daughter — five years old?— stood next to her and watched her get the injection and asked if it hurt. Her husband took a picture just as she said, "Not at all."
Then me:
It was one of those rare moments in my life when my body aligned with my feelings. Humble, disbelieving gratitude. I see now that I gripped the arm getting the shot as if it were some kind of lifeline.
The Russian woman told me go sit down where I'd been and wait for fifteen minutes to be sure I had no reaction.
Well, I had a reaction. I cried like a baby. I thought of the hundreds of scientists — more — who had raced to develop these vaccines, and I thought of the hundreds of thousands of volunteers who had allowed their bodies to test them, and I thought of the hundreds of thousands of dead — in this country alone —for whom they came to late. I thought of the tens of millions who had been hospitalized, and the millions yet to die or be hospitalized, because, unlike me, they didn't get to sit on this Saturday afternoon in a drugstore in the Upper West Side to be saved.
And I thought about the long, terrible year we'd been through. And how it was over, for me. Yet not close to over for so many millions, most of them poorer than me, darker than me, and, frankly, more deserving than me, because they or the people they loved had given and lost so much more than I had, a year in which I'd lost practically nothing but for the convenience of in-person work and the luxury of walking through the world without wearing a life-saving mask.
Nevertheless, I was right to get the shot when I could. Like those in line both before me and after me, we were doing our part to end the reign of the virus and return our lives to ourselves. Yes, inevitably, some new plague will "rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.” But getting up from my chair and walking out of Walgreens, into New York City's early spring sunlight, I recognized without effort the strange, timeless joy that brought an end to my weeping. The Greeks, from what I understand, called it hope.
