The arc of history is long and it binds us to each other.

The arc of history is long and it binds us to each other.

Good morning. 

This is Pam Marino, marveling at how the arc of history can bend so far that it can connect, bind and directly impact generations well into the future.

Such is the case for Pacific Grove resident Sigrid Stokes, a family nurse practitioner in her 70s whose mother, Kristine Berg Mueller, was a 14-year-old hospital volunteer in Stavanger, Norway during the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918.

Now, 103 years later and in the midst of a new pandemic, Stokes is administering Covid-19 vaccines at Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital. You can see a photo of her at work in my cover story this week about the struggles the county is going through to get people vaccinated.

Stokes feels her mother’s presence with her as she is giving Covid-19 vaccines, bolstered by the fact that while she’s working she wears gold-rimmed, enamel earrings made from a necklace her mother used to wear night and day. 

Her mother’s immigrant story is an inspirational one. After Mueller worked as a hospital volunteer, she knew she wanted to become a nurse. She also knew the education she needed to pursue her dream was in the U.S.

After petitioning her Aunt Kristine, who lived in San Francisco, her aunt finally agreed and Mueller traveled by ship to New York in 1923. She boarded a train to California to begin her new life. The only English she knew at the time was a single word: “Yes.”

Mueller worked as a nanny and eventually learned enough English to be accepted into a nursing program at a hospital in San Francisco. She graduated in 1930 and was married that same year to Stokes’ father, but children did not come until Mueller was in her late 30s. 

At first, Stokes didn’t want to be a nurse like her mother. She majored in journalism and worked for a time in international conservation before realizing at age 28 that nursing was the career for her. 

It was her mother who taught Stokes how to give a good shot. 

“I give good jabs,” she jokes, using British parlance. “You get a good grip, pinch it and then you dart that puppy in there!” Her patients sometimes don’t even know Stokes is finished, it’s that painless. 

A young teen’s desire to help during a pandemic in Norway in the last century extends all the way to a hospital and the people of Salinas in this one. And the connecting piece, Stokes, is only just getting started.

“I’m in my mid-70s, there's a lot to do, and I feel like I frantically need to do more,” she says by phone, not long before she heads out the door to SVMH to give more jabs to health care workers. “We’ve got to get busy with this.”

Stokes’ friends who are eligible for Covid-19 vaccines—if only there were some to be had at the moment—ask her all the time when she thinks they’ll be able to get vaccinated. 

It’s a marathon, she tells them. Just as runners hit the wall several miles before the finish line, we’re at a similar wall in this pandemic but we’ve got to keep going. Wear masks, wash hands, social distance. We’ll get society back up and running again.

“Hang in there,” she says. “We’ll get to the end of the marathon.”

Pam Marino, staff writer, pam@mcweekly.com