This is the story of my first fully vaccinated day.
Like Alice, I left a lonely world with only a cat as companion and stepped through the looking glass into a technicolor dream world.
(Or did I leave the not-so-Wonderland that we’ve all been living in for the past fourteen months and come back home? This is pondering best left to Lewis Carroll, I think.)
I haven’t burned my mask collection just yet, and I remain a work-from-home warrior for the time being.
But I’m rolling again.
I awoke to the day I’d circled on my calendar thirty-five days ago when I received my first shot and felt like Cinderella, cleaning up the kitchen and drinking coffee while the birds sang and the sun streamed through the windows.
Vaccinated and caffeinated, I began the day with a haircut eighteen months in the making, shedding the weight of this long year.
With the preliminaries out of the way, how does a girl spend her first vaccinated day?
For a Pennsylvania movie buff who’s spent the year blogging about classic films, there’s only one answer: The Jimmy Stewart Museum.
I picked up the parents and we hit the road.
Stewart, star of It’s A Wonderful Life, Rear Window, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (among many others) grew up in Indiana, Pennsylvania, a quaint town about an hour’s drive from my own. The museum is across the street from what used to be his father’s hardware store, and is within sight of his childhood home. Filled with movie posters, awards, and memorabilia from his childhood, film career, and military service, this little gem is a must-visit for Stewart fans. We chatted up the staff and they gave us great background on Stewart, his family, and the construction of their little museum.
I left with a new appreciation for Stewart, a list of films to watch, and a Jimmy Stewart lamp that now sits on my writing desk.
Then we ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the car. A restaurant on the first vaccinated day? Too much, too soon. We can’t have all the thrills at once.
And how did I end this gloriously normal, perfect day?
With as much of the posse as we could scrape together, of course.
This isn’t over, folks. We know that. But here’s to the beginning of the end. And the return of these perfectly normal days.
