At long last, a COVID-free summer vacation!

Larry and Lynne enjoyed seeing Niagara Falls while on vacation in July. (Howard Solomon photo)

This column, which was published in the September 2023 edition of Jewish Rhode Island of Providence, celebrates the joy of having a carefree summer vacation for the first time in four years --- which my wife and I enjoyed in mid-July.
I also expressed a strong wish that the U.S. government would expedite the vaccines against the latest COVID-19 variants, and at this writing, the latest word from the CDC is that the latest booster should be available by the end of next week. (Approval was supposed to come at a Sept. 12 CDC meeting.)
Meanwhile, with COVID cases rising yet again, there’s talk of bringing back some mask mandates, but that would be a mistake, because there is neither the will nor the appetite among Americans to be forced to wear masks.
Mind you, I do still wear a mask in some crowded indoor places, though I didn’t last week when I took the commuter rail train into Boston in the early afternoon, because I decided to have a coffee and bagel en route to Boston’s Back Bay Station, where I was going before walking over to Fenway Park for an afternoon game against the Houston Astros.
While it still may be prudent to wear masks in some settings, the fact is that it’s downright DEPRESSING to hear mask mandates and SOCIAL DISTANCING being bandied about again by some health officials nearly 3 ½ years after COVID first hit. If the so-called powers that be want to throw millions into a depression, just try to enforce those mandates ---- they won’t work!
Yes, we must learn to live with COVID, but no, we can’t revert to the time when we were afraid to socialize for the longest time! Our mental health is fragile enough without bringing back mask mandates and other restrictions, so don’t further polarize the nation by enacting mandates that will prove impossible to enforce. Instead, leave it up to the individual's discretion.

Enjoy this column. The link to it on the Jewish Rhode Island website is:  https://www.jewishrhody.com/stories/the-pandemic-in-the-rearview-mirror,42978?
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I did something this summer that I hadn’t done in four years: take an honest-to-goodness vacation out of town.
In fact, my wife Lynne and I not only left the state and region, but we traveled to Southern Ontario in Canada to visit relatives whom we hadn’t seen in more than a decade. We had been mulling taking a trip there earlier, but the COVID-19 pandemic quashed those plans.
But more than three years after COVID-19 forever changed the way we look at things, we finally felt comfortable enough to visit my relatives, including my uncle and aunt, both of whom are 92.
Marcia and Harold are both in relatively good health, and my uncle still drives and works in the family’s clothing store, which my cousin Dave now runs. They live in St. Catharines, Ontario, a short drive from Niagara Falls. We stopped overnight in Utica, N.Y., about the halfway point, and then spent a little more than three days visiting them.
My aunt is my mother’s youngest sibling and while I was growing up in the Dorchester and Mattapan sections of Boston, she and my uncle and their sons used to visit us most summers. While visiting Boston regularly, my cousins became diehard Red Sox fans (there was no Major League team in Toronto in the ’60s), and my father Ike would buy tickets to a few Sox games at Fenway Park.
Those games were always one of the highlights of their trips, and one of the most memorable one occurred Aug. 18, 1967, a balmy Friday night during the unforgettable Impossible Dream season, when the 100-1 Red Sox won the American League pennant in dramatic fashion back in the days before Major League baseball instituted post-season playoffs.
This particular game featured a key matchup against the California Angels (now called the Los Angeles Angels even though they play in Anaheim). We were sitting in the first-base grandstand when a fastball slammed into the left cheekbone of Red Sox superstar and teen idol, right fielder Tony Conigliaro, who was known as “Tony C.”
I can still hear the thud when Angels pitcher Jack Hamilton’s ball smashed into Tony C’s helmet and sent him sprawling on the ground in the bottom of the fourth inning. The Sox won that game, but when the picture of Tony C with his black eye in his hospital bed was splashed across the front pages of Boston’s papers on Saturday morning, it was clear that not only was Conigliaro done for the year, but his future was in jeopardy.
Fifty-six years later, my cousins are parents and one, Dave, is a grandparent, which gave us another good reason to visit this year. His grandson, River, is a cute 18-month-old and we cemented his Red Sox fan status by giving him a Sox cap.
Besides visiting my relatives, we also met up with an old friend who lives in Toronto. We were grateful that Howard agreed to take the bus from Toronto to St. Catharines because we were told that the commute by car to Ontario’s capital city, which used to be about an hour, is now closer to two.
We met him on a Friday, and we did the only true tourist thing of the trip with him, driving to Niagara Falls, where we strolled along the scenic overlook and took some spectacular photos of the Falls.
During our two hours there, I kept thinking that it wasn’t too long ago, that I wondered if I’d ever be able to travel again to a popular tourist spot due to the pandemic and its aftermath, but there we were, walking around, and for perhaps the first time, the pandemic seemed like a distant memory. We dined at restaurants absent of mask-wearing and social distancing, and it was a most joyous vacation.
Now, with fall and winter on the horizon, I’m hoping that the country doesn’t get complacent and that the government fast-tracks a new round of vaccines against COVID-19. I hope those latest shots will be ready for distribution by the fall because we can’t afford to repeat the pandemic’s hellish days.
Everyone lost years off their lives. The pandemic brought us Zoom, but  little else positive. Those dark times have killed more than 1.1 million Americans (to date) and wreaked havoc on many aspects of our lives, including:
* Exacerbating the mental health of people of all ages, especially teens and young adults.
* Forcing students to learn remotely, which irreparably harmed them and set back learning in the United States for years.
* Harming the economic viability of downtowns, which led to the closing of hundreds of restaurants and businesses.
* Sending rents in cities and towns to ludicrously high levels that few people can comfortably afford.
* Turning millions of Americans into selfish people who have forgotten how to get along with others and who lack either empathy or tolerance for anyone with different views or beliefs.
* Pushing our politics, already on a downhill spiral, irrevocably out of control and forever blurring the lines between truth and fiction.
* Emboldening millions to embrace hate of all kinds toward minorities, with the result that Blacks, Jews, Asians, Hispanics, Muslims and the LGBTQ+ community have been increasingly targeted by hate speech and violence  just because of who they are.
So, while I felt blessed to be able to take a normal vacation again, I worry for the country’s future.
LARRY KESSLER (larrythek65@gmail.com) is a freelance writer based in North Attleboro. He blogs at larrytheklineup.blogspot.com