Someone once told me that we baby boomers should never have survived. They had a point.
We started out by coming home from the hospital without a car seat. Next, it was a seatbelt-less childhood. We bounced around on the front seat of the car or the farm truck with only an arm flung out to protect us.
We survived doses of cod liver oil and other horrid cures. Because I was puny, I was given some wretched concoction called Neo Chemical Food to increase my appetite. (It was a miracle potion. It’s still working.)
We drank water from garden hoses, ate dirt encrusted carrots and radishes from the garden and we shared bottles of pop with our friends. We survived without cell phones. We ran with terror in our hearts when the nine o’clock curfew siren wailed because we knew that the elderly policeman in town in his little old Austin Healey car was coming to get us.
At Halloween, we double dared each other to go up to the creepy house set way back off the street. On Saturday afternoons, we sat in the front row of the local theatre and cheered when Roy Rogers on his horse Trigger, saved the heroine, Dale Evans.
We skated, played hockey, pump-pump-pull-away and kick the can. We rode bikes without helmets, fought each other, fell out of trees, tormented each other with reptiles and put baseballs through the neighbor’s kitchen window. If we got in trouble at school, we received it twice as bad at home.
We had no TV, no computer and no video games — just imagination, friends and books. We were never politically correct. More often than not, we were just plain mean.
We didn’t have product recalls, helmets, safety warnings, car seats or time-outs. But we survived.
We survived our youth, our teen years, our mid-life crisis and whatever else life has thrown at us, to become the “75% of Alberta’s most elderly now vaccinated against Covid-19.” (Really, we are “most elderly”? How did this happen so fast?)
There was no discussion in our household about whether or not to get The Shot. There was no debate. We just booked The Shot. Then we traveled a hundred miles to a provincial vaccination centre to get it done.
Inside the well-organized centre, we were treated with respect and kindness by each of the cheerful nurses and staff whose job it was to repeat the same litany to each person being vaccinated.
After The Shot, while waiting our mandatory fifteen minutes to ensure we didn’t start frothing at the mouth, I thought about how lucky we are. I looked around at all the other people having their turn and I thought: we are so lucky to be able to receive this vaccination. It has been just over a year since this illness came to our communities, and here we are. I felt so grateful that there are brilliant scientists and people who can manufacture the vaccines that are going to help save many lives.
When we returned home that day we stopped at the farm. The pussy willows had opened bringing with them the promise of spring and of hope.
Stay well, everyone.
- Beth
