I spent some time on a high school campus yesterday volunteering at a vaccination site in San Bernardino. A couple of things before I wander off on the road of rumination: This mass vaccination effort is insanely impressive. The style and scope of where I was yesterday is replicated thousands of times over across the nation: a school gymnasium, convention center, armory-style setting. Dozens of doctors and nurses and otherwise capable shot-givers, twenty-or-so intake humans in the parking lot at a mobile site and on into the location itself directing folkx what to do and where to go. All of it with seemingly very little drama (except for the occasional fainting, which I didn’t see any of yesterday, but I hear does happen), and for the most part pretty happy/relieved vibe. I have not ever been around so many needles going into so many arms and marveled at the various approaches people employ in the face of the shot. The full owl-like head-turn in the opposite direction (what, a shot? in my arm? no. I’m looking over there at…anything, really. tra-la-la nothing to see here.) Then there is the fully engaged curious-puppy approach. (what’re you doing? what’re you doing? that looks…ouch.) There’s the stare straight ahead I-am-a-statue pose and the hey-i’m-talkin’-here, what we’re done? style. I’m of the gabber variety. Anticipation of pain puts my mouth in overdrive. Pity the tattoo artists who have worked on me. Very challenging.

On a cookie break, I wandered around outside of said Arroyo Valley High School, where no students have been for a year and I noticed two fully occupied nests built up in some rafters above the quad area. I’m thinking these nesting birds have not had such a complete run of the school’s real estate in … ever. Staring into the area, I remembered my own brush with high school quads. In fact the photo above reflects my junior year at high school hanging out on smoker’s hill—because apparently that was a thing back in the late 70s. We did actually smoke on that hill. cigarettes mostly. probably. University High School in Irvine, California. Hadn’t really thought of it for years although recently, Ezra Klein, a writer for the NYTimes, mentioned he’s an alum many years after me. He turned out pretty cool, it seems. (In fact his editorial today touting the realistic ways toward a more humane world makes important points about the very real terror inflicted on animals killed hourly in the pursuit of satisfying a ravenous nation of meat eaters.) In my senior year, I left Uni High for an alternative school named SELF, which was definitely an acronym for something, but hell if I remember what. (Suggestions welcome. I just googled it and only found this story about some SELF kids being arrested during their prom in 2000.) It was actually the perfect place for me to feel more at home and engaged with learning. We studied the lyrics to songs for social studies and got PhysEd credit for riding our bikes to school. This is where my love for the two-wheeler was sealed, although looking at old home movies (I mentioned we found a box in my dad’s shed that have now been digitally converted), I realize I always enjoyed the bicycle over the car.

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As the stroll around those high school grounds reminded me, you think you have a clue back then about where, when, how you’ll go forward in life. Maybe it’s tiny, but at least something that propels you forward into some level of “Yeah, I might like doing that.” I was no different, although certainly fuzzy on the specifics. I could cobble together what I liked to do back then: listen to music. Especially Led Zeppelin and Van Halen, although any job opportunities connected with them seemed to involve heels and makeup (both of which I was less-than-good-with) and a certain suspension of self-governance, or let’s just call it what it was, objectification–big word, didn’t understand full meaning–that I couldn’t quite get how to approach. Naturally I’d have taken the job of muse but I had no idea what school you went to for that and groupie didn’t pay well and required the aforementioned heel/makeup, object combo. I enjoyed eating Doritos and sometimes putting Mr. Bubble in the apartment complex jacuzzi. Neither of those were a career path. I loved to read. Wasn’t sure how to get paid at that. I really liked to write. This offered possibilities especially when combined with music. So in finding myself cross the country after two years of journalism classes at Cal State Long Beach, I finished my degree in New York and became a music journalist. It wasn’t that I was surprised by the career, more felt it was a product of momentum. Which was good. And also complicated. And I wouldn’t have not done it. Of course, as with many things, how would it have been to take the knowledge of now back to the activities of then? Instead, taking the knowledge of now and having compassion for the person of then. That’s more like it.

After my cookie was gone, I went back inside to both people watch and do vaccination data entry. I ended up talking to a traveling nurse, Ms. Tanesha, from Mississippi whose been in the area for a month. She’s been on the road since February of 2020 and gone to almost every state in the union to assist in Covid nasal swab testing, set up mass sites like the Javits Center for overflow coronavirus patients, and, finally, now, to work at this vaccination location. A full arc of the virus in one career year. She has three kids and a husband who she’s seen only occasionally in over a year. She loves Southern hot sauce. She misses them all terribly. As she travels, they put her up in hotels, give her a per diem and, as she says, fully appreciate that she’s there. They also pay well, she told me a bit under her breath. The gig ends in June and she’s looking forward to going home, and although she acknowledged that this year has been incredibly hard on her family and the world, she also appreciated the chance she’s had to do what she’s done. A mixed bag, she said. Then added, I never would have predicted I’d get this kind of experience or meet the people, visit the places I have. And there are a whole lot of us out there who are doing this, she added. You just never know.

I thought about the people this year who have worked inside and on the edges, pulling a common thread through our lives that has helped with our survival. And all those shrugs of I-never-would-have-thought-I’d… moments that this pandemic has brought into personal view for many many folkx. Lives are always filled with rewrites and plot shifts, futures altering. I know that logically, but have started to get it more emotionally too. Here’s to pedaling on and getting some life credit at the same time. And to the many people like Ms. Tanesha who have literally shown up. I’m so appreciative.