The past week brought us to a new plateau of optimism. In large measure the explanation is rather obviously calendrical and meteorological. We are very near the equinox. The increment in the hours of daylight, the quality of the light itself, a dramatic if brief rise in temperature that has left in our field of vision only scattered patches of snow rather than deep snowfields. We are threatened with some more cold days and even snow flurries, but we are surely past some tipping point.
For us the specific day may have been February 19. On that day we got our first injections of the Moderna vaccine. I am fairly patient and stoical, but the moment I got the shot I realized that I had been much more concerned about the matter than I was willing to let on even to myself—or, perhaps, especially to myself. The somewhat unlikely venue was the gardening section of a huge Walmart store in a shopping mall in North Brunswick, NJ, about fifteen miles north of us. This may sound a bit dubious, but the whole set-up was brilliant—quick, efficient, and uncrowded. The registrars were all friendly, courteous, upbeat young people, solicitous of their elderly charges. The hardest thing about it was walking from the registry desk at the pharmacy to the place where the shots were actually administered, a distance of about a city block, all of it of course through aisle after aisle of Walmart merchandise. I deduce that the garden department had been chosen both for its peripheral location within the big box and because in mid-February there are few customers milling about among the large sacks of grass seed and turf-builder. I suppose a sense of relief is what most people experience as they leave a Walmart, but on this occasion the experience approached delight.
But what I set out to write about was not that we got our jabs but how we came by them. Many weeks ago I registered my sense of dissatisfaction at how vaccination was proceeding in the state of New Jersey. The system was poorly organized and poorly explained, leaving one with the impression of a poverty of opportunities and an arbitrariness in their allocation. I now realize this was, and to some extent still is, pretty much a national problem. Elaborate websites featured impressive full pages of telephone numbers to call and forms to fill out, but none of this seemed ever to lead to actual vaccination appointments as opposed to endless referrals to other telephone numbers. Once crucial medical workers and other “front-liners” had been addressed, the largest number of high priority candidates for vaccination were the elderly—and especially the already infirm elderly. The press began to raise an unsettling theme. Getting an appointment might depend less upon a theoretical eligibility than upon digital sophistication and a persistent Darwinian competitiveness, characteristics for which the targeted population was perhaps not conspicuous. Though there are more geezer computer whizzes and Tiger Greatgrandmoms than you might think, there was more than enough truth in this analysis to cause a bit of generalized elder distress.
Then, out of the blue, I got a telephone call from a woman named Kathy. She has a last name of course, but of course I didn’t take it in, neatly demonstrating that I was exactly the kind of person she had it in mind to call. She is now preserved in my phone “contacts” as Kathy Covid—perhaps a poor repayment for her kindness, but an efficient way of differentiating her from a surprisingly large number of other Kathies recorded in that registry. Kathy was calling from somewhere up in the northern part of Somerset County. She told me that she and a few friends had formed a group to help elderly people (the diplomatic phrase she used was eligible people) set up vaccination appointments. Would we be interested? You bet. Within two hours we were able to schedule appointments. I passed on her number to friends, and they had similar results. When I called Kathy myself a couple of days later to thank her for her help, she was very gracious, though it seemed to me obvious that she hadn’t remembered my name. By that time she had probably talked with, and aided, dozens of other elders.
Most people who love poetry even a little are likely to have read Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” a poem which is about, among other things, recollected memories and their relation to the moral life. In it the poet recounts revisiting, after an absence of five years, the beautiful countryside above the ruins of a twelfth-century monastery on the Welsh borders. His earlier memories of the natural beauty are revivified, though they have never left him. “These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind man's eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind With tranquil restoration:—feelings too Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence On that best portion of a good man's life, His little, nameless, unremembered, acts Of kindness and of love…” Little, unremembered acts of kindness and of love…perhaps the most famous lines in a famous poem. They hardly need glossing, though these days one should perhaps make an observation relating to linguistic history. Wordsworth here uses man in its common eighteenth-century generalizing sense of human kind. It is not, as we say now, “gender specific”. What Kathy Covid did for us was indeed an act of kindness and of love, and indeed was also apparently unremembered after only a few days, or at least detached from memorial specificity amid a plethora of other such kind acts.
It is now just over a year a since the plague fell upon the world, negatively affecting all of human social life, but especially the daily life of complex industrial and commercial societies like our own. And in our country the effects seemed exacerbated by a threatening synergy of medical and political malaise culminating, in these parts at least, in the midst of the darkening cold of winter. The lack of social cohesion made vivid at the personal level in the enforced isolation of so many of us, and more broadly in the inability of our government to get anything very serious done, has seemed painfully apparent. Under these circumstances little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love can suddenly claim a great name and memorability, certainly, among those who have experienced them.
