The First Thing I Will Do after We All Get Vaccinated

     The first thing I will do is get a haircut.

    The next thing I will do is sit for an hour in my favorite coffee shop with a book and a cup of coffee and partly read and partly watch the two women chatting at the adjacent table and the checkers players across the room and the Bible study group and the student with her books and love every minute of discreet comradeship.

    The next thing I will do is have dinner with friends at a restaurant, where someone else will do the cooking and the place is noisy with laughter and clamor from young people on dates and families eating out together and an elderly couple celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary and all the waitpeople, unmasked, walking freely between tables, pouring wine with broad smiles, bringing steaming plates of delicious food made by the happy chef in the busy kitchen.

    Then I will get on a train for eight hours and go visit my granddaughter, and I will talk happily with the seat mate I would previously have ignored so I could read my book because although I could read my book any time during the pandemic, to have a seat mate to relate to is a treat.

    I will say to everyone I see—the conductor on the train, the waitperson at the restaurant, the barista at the coffee shop, the hairdresser, everyone I pass on the street—"What a beautiful smile you have."

    I will say, "How nice it is to see your face."

    The next thing I will do is take a big plastic bag and pick up every piece of trash that has been collecting at the side of the road for a year, but maybe before I do that, I'll get a two-hour massage and let the trash sit for just another day.

    I will go to a concert and then to a play and then to a Fourth-of-July parade, sitting cheek by jowl with open-faced strangers, and I will smile radiantly at them as we enjoy together our common pleasures.

    I will have a grand party at my house, and everyone will eat great food and drink and talk freely without the muffle of masks, and I will hug everyone who comes in the door and again each person who leaves and probably do a lot of hugging in between, too.

    Then I will get on an airplane and go somewhere just for the experience of being on an airplane.

    I will hang my mask on a hook in the closet. I thought about burning it, but it is a symbol of our common suffering and our combined efforts to overcome this adversity, and I think I'll keep it.

    I will never do another Zoom meeting.