Running Ruminations

It’s late May, and earlier this week, officials in President Biden’s administration remarked that half of the US adult population is fully vaccinated. In January, it was closer to 1%. 

As I quickly noted last week, SCC is now in the yellow tier, and I recently learned that the SJ metro area has both “the nation’s highest percentage of residents vaccinated against COVID-19” and that “it’s also among the leaders for lowest rates of new cases.” 

I spent six hours on Saturday at an (outdoor) birthday party at the pool, and aside from the young children who aren’t yet eligible, every single adult there was fully vaccinated. 

I’ve given two non-family members, also fully vaccinated, hugs in the past week, the first since … before the pandemic, IIRC.

I have a very, very short trip back to the midwest coming up soon to celebrate a major life milestone for a family member, and I’ll be seeing almost everyone in my family for the first time in about 18 months (!). 

G’s Daisy Girl Scout troop — that kindergarten families finally joined in late March, after a tough year of virtual learning — just had our first in-person meeting a couple days ago. 

Some local-ish trail races are beginning to open up registration for summer races, and I am beginning to feel the itch to sign up and get something on the calendar for the first time in… a while. 

I can’t tell you how good all of this feels, how normal all of this *finally* is, but I know you know because it has been a year (plus) for all of us.

We can celebrate the progress we’ve made toward combating COVID in the past year while simultaneously acknowledging the pain, death, and destruction it has wrought for so many people all over the world as well as right here, in our own backyard. 

It’s so nice to be slowly, seemingly, moving past it, but god it sucks to think of the millions of people whose lives/livelihoods have been permanently, adversely altered by it, and how many people are still in the thick of it (and who will likely be “in the thick of it” for some time to come) not due to any fault of their own.

And while COVID updates here, locally, bring hope, at the opposite end of the spectrum this morning was the early-morning news that there was a mass shooting here in SJ, at the VTA yard, pretty close to downtown, and just a hop, skip, and a jump away from law enforcement offices. As of the time I’m writing this, nine people have died. 

There were so few mass shootings during the pandemic because so few of us were around masses of people, in the first place, and we all hailed it as an unexpected-but-revered silver lining. How twisted is that, right? 

Now that the pandemic is receding (in some areas), and more people are beginning to return to their normal, non-home environments on a regular basis, I guess we’re back to the status quo with mass shootings in everyday environments, like in people’s workplaces. 

SJ is the 15th mass shooting event of 2021. 

Again: it’s May.