Today was the day. Time to head to the county courthouse for a little prick in the arm.

The entire process took less than half an hour. Checked in, secured a second Covid vaccine appointment, got my “Fauci Ouchie,” and went into the rotunda to sit in a chair for 15-minutes, just in case.

And whom should I run into?

Why, it’s Mr. Lincoln!

As must as I’d like to have sat next to him, Abraham and I agreed that we needed to uphold social distancing rules.

He and I had each brought along a book for reading.

It was a little hard to concentrate, though. Another vaccinatee was loudly chatting it up with the EMS officer on duty.

“Have you ever seen anything like this before?”

The officer, armed with a squirt bottle of bleach water, pondered for a bit and then mentioned the polio outbreak that occurred during the first half of the twentieth century.

The other fellow wasn’t familiar with polio. Lucky man.

My great-aunt Ginny was stricken with polio before she even started school. There was no vaccine. It was the end of the 1910s and Ginny’s dad had just died. Her mom was left with seven children.

I met Ginny when she was an older lady. She walked with a pronounced limp, but that was the only scar left behind by polio’s terrifying threat of paralysis.

Many children, perhaps even Ginny, had to spend long hours in an iron lung machine (below) just to be able to breathe.

When Ginny was well enough, she went to a different school in New Haven than her siblings had attended. Since she had trouble walking, Ginny needed to attend the closest school, which was on Clinton Avenue. St. Francis, the Catholic elementary school, was considerably farther from home.

Here’s Ginny in the 1960s with several of her siblings.

Gary recently learned that two of his cousins contracted polio during the 1950s epidemic. Both received treatment and survived, thankfully.

Vaccines are credited with keeping the United States polio-free since 1979. Only a few places in the world remain where polio is still a threat.

A little more than a century ago, Gary’s paternal grandma lost her brother John to what was then called the Spanish Flu. It was during the 1918 pandemic, which struck one-third of the world’s population. John Henry was a farm boy. He was a soldier. There was no vaccine.

He was just 23 years old.

A decade later, in Auburn, Maine, my Grandma Vayo’s father also died in a flu epidemic. Achille Plante was only 51. He joined his set of premature twins in heaven. Achille left behind seven children and their mother, Jennie.

Glancing across the courthouse rotunda today, I could see Mr. Lincoln solemnly taking in these stories. He also knew painful loss; his mother, his sister, three of his sons. As president, he comforted many, many parents of soldiers.

We returned to our books.

I checked later to see if there might be a quote from Mr. Lincoln to provide a suitable ending to this story.

Please continue to social distance, wear your masks, and wash your hands. If you haven’t already received the vaccine, you’ll get the opportunity soon.

Be safe.

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