I’m lucky to live in Vermont, the first state in the nation to achieve an 80% COVID-19 vaccination rate. The odds look good.
After our unexpected 15-month pause, I’m choosing not to return to my humble weekend job as one of several managers at Dartmouth College’s athletic facilities office this fall.
Even though students and staff are required to be vaccinated, and Dartmouth has one of the most scrupulously maintained virus safety programs in the country, I just don’t want to bump into the wrong sneeze.
Frankly, I’m afraid of the delta variant, even though I’ve been Moderna-vaccinated for months.
The job at Dartmouth’s athletic facilities was ideal for a retired high school teacher: weekends only, banker’s hours (9 a.m. to 3 p.m.), access to every athletic event, from football to lacrosse, soccer to tennis, swimming and diving competitions and the renowned Ivy League Heptagonal Indoor Track & Field Championships — you name it.
One of my jobs was to make sure the correct teams were in the correct spaces in the $24 million, multibuilding, multifield complex. It also involved ensuring the main desks were staffed, mostly by students, and it occasionally meant filling in for absences at the last minute, a hectic nuisance.
In addition, I often found myself walking through crowds of people — spectators and competitors. Many cheering. Many breathing heavily. It’s athletics, after all.
I worked there from 2013 to the pandemic shutdown in March 2020. Never missed a weekend. It didn’t pay much, but it was exciting and I loved it. But I’m trying to get out gracefully while the getting is good.
Still … still. It’s hard to give it up.
Too risky.
For these last 15 months, I’ve trained myself to be a kind of professional recluse. For more than a year now, my only indoor contact with other people has been brief visits to a grocery store or pharmacy. Visits to the doctor were on Zoom.
Another factor: Not working goes against my Puritan upbringing.
My father’s highest value was getting to work no matter what. He drove 65 miles one way from Hamden to Old Greenwich, Conn., every day for 30 years. He was never late, even in the monstrous ice storm of 1973.
But ice is visible to the naked eye. The delta variant is not.
The idea of returning to my two, six-hour weekend shifts at the athletic facilities, potentially coming in contact with hundreds of people — even vaccinated people — just makes me nervous.
I’ll bet I’m not alone in that.
And if I don’t return to that weekend job, maybe that’s exactly what I will wind up being.
Alone.
Paul Keane lives in Hartford Village.