
I remember the first time I saw a rose-breasted grosbeak. I was a teenage birdwatcher in Ohio, and my parents and I were birding in a group somewhere, probably Greenlawn Cemetery. My Dad spotted a bird he didn’t immediately recognize, and someone else in the group called out the ID: grosbeak!
My Dad gave detailed instructions to anyone who wanted to see the bird: it’s in the pale green tree around two o’clock, about ten feet from the center, on a half-bare branch. And while folks around me gradually called out “Got it,” and “Beautiful,” I frantically scanned the place where the bird was supposed to be: nothing!
After several minutes of listening to everyone else Ooh and Ahh over a bird I still couldn’t see, I cried out in a near panic: “I don’t see it! I don’t see it!” My Dad laughed and told me to calm down: the bird wasn’t going anywhere.
After a few more minutes of my Dad describing exactly where I needed to look, I finally saw my first-ever rose-breasted grosbeak: a chunky black-and-white robin-sized bird with a slash of hot pink beneath its throat. The bird was as beautiful as everyone had said, and just like that, my panic over Not Seeing A Grosbeak turned into satisfaction over another life bird bagged.
These days, getting a COVID vaccine is like spotting a grosbeak. Everyone around me, it seems, is getting the vaccine and posting jubilant pictures on social media, but I’m not yet old, sick, or essential enough to be eligible. I know the vaccine isn’t going anywhere–it will still be there when it is eventually, finally, my turn–but in the meantime, I’m fretting in the Not Yet: the Not Yet Spring, the Not Yet End of this interminable semester, the Not Yet End of the pandemic.
We live in a world with plenty of grosbeaks, but when your own is hiding, you can worry yourself into a frenzy over what seems so near, but has not yet arrived.