It’s the theme of the past seven days since I last wrote: seismic. 

Today would be John’s 58th birthday. 

It’s a weird feeling, like you’re forgetting to do something, when someone you love, who has recently died, has a birthday. 

There’s no group text with the birthday gal/guy and all your mutual friends, with everyone heaping on their birthday wishes; no rash commentary about aging (or for runners, no “hey at least I gained a couple minutes on my BQ window!” or “I moved up an AG!”); nothing like that. 

Instead, the group text is with everyone else, everyone but the birthday person, acknowledging how bizarre and unfair it is that the deceased isn’t here for his or her birthday. Pretty much everyone’s birthday in 2020 was muted, dimmed, by the pandemic; I doubt John thought that his “pandemic birthday” would be his last. 

It’s brutal. 

To memorialize John and celebrate what would have been his 58th birthday today, on April 21, all of us from our FF BB ‘10 group decided we’d run 4.21 miles and then jump on a Google Meet chat tonight to pay our respects. 

I ran my typical workweek route from home through ARP, turning around a little later than usual because I had a little more pep in my step, and simply enjoyed the morning, listening to a SWAP podcast for the first ~30’ and then the birdsong for the balance, the ~3.8mi to get back home. It was lovely. I thought of him the entire time.  

*

In the past seven days since my last writing, life has begun to shift. Last week Thursday, I was one of the 12,000 (!) people vaccinated at Levi’s Stadium on April 15, the original day that the state of California increased vaccine availability to everyone 16 years+; I say the “original day” because I guess the county or state moved it to 4/14 midweek, but by then I had already secured the appointment. 

I got to spend close to 3 hours at Levi’s Stadium with thousands of my best stranger friends as we moved through queue, after queue, after queue to get our Pfizer shot. 

It was amazing. I was so excited and happy to be there. I would have brought at least A with me so she could witness history being made with this large-scale public vaccination campaign, but alas, she was still in school when I left. In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t bring my kids because they would have been bored to tears and over it within the first twenty minutes, ha. 

Honestly, it was like being in line at Disneyland, multiplied by being in line for TSA, multiplied by going through customs for international travel, multiplied by being at the DMV. I kept thinking to myself that if this were a ride at Disneyland, we would all agree that it’s pretty fast-moving. We rarely stood still. (And of course, C, who got his shot at the same place just a couple days later, was in and out in fifteen minutes. Seriously!!?) 

In my tribute to John a couple weeks ago, I mentioned that I rarely run on the GRT anymore but that from now on, in the infrequent chances I were there, I’d think of him and of our ten-miles-in-the-pouring-rain run wherein we ran to Levi’s so he could see it up close. How interesting that out of anywhere I could have gone to get my COVID vaccine, I went to Levi’s. For sure there are specific considerations that went into play that made me go there — appointment availability, location, ease, all that stuff — but still. It makes me wonder. 

I would have loved to tell John that I got vaccinated there.

*

Last thing. I think yesterday’s ‘guilty’ verdicts for Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for over 9 minutes — which a seventeen year-old, Darnella Frazier, documented on her phone, whose video spread around the world last Memorial Day and helped advance a national (international) reckoning supporting Black Lives Matter — I think yesterday’s ‘guilty’ verdicts have already become something seared into our collective memory. Where were you when you heard the verdict? (Costco, grocery shopping, glued to NYT). 

It is progress, advancement. 

More than anything, it’s accountability. It’s an exception to the exception, but finally, there is accountability.

It is horrific and inexcusable that it came at the cost of human life and in no way does it atone for the countless other Black and Brown people’s lives lost at the hands of a white supremacist society, generally, or at the hands of law enforcement officers, specifically. We can’t bring back those we’ve lost, unfortunately. 

Nonetheless, it’s a step — roger that, a seismic step —  in the right direction.