The memory is vivid and vague – a sensation that intrudes more clearly than do the details of historical fact.
It’s evening, a Christmas Eve. I shake presents from under the tree while dressed in my Sunday best. We’ll soon head to church, which seems a fool’s priority when we could open gifts now, not hours from now. Parents never understand these things.
But the gifts must await all the churchy folderol and the driving home, changing into PJ’s and no doubt hurrying the pokey grownups. The reward lies across time’s chasm, tantalizing yet unreachable.
My impatience during that Christmas – at age 7 or 8 – is a metaphor for anticipating coronavirus vaccines. We’re told the world now has effective vaccines. Our deliverance will come soon, soon …
Not soon enough.
We’ve entered the hardest period of our isolation. Vaccines will restore us to community. But the logistics of manufacturing, distributing and administering mean that, for most of us, deliverance lies on the far side of soon.
It will come, as did a long-ago boy’s Christmas Eve reward. We need only patience.
