As a child, winter meant lots of snow, heavy Mighty Mack jackets, frosty mittens, snowball fights and living dangerously on our Flexible Flyer sleds.
I grew up in a suburb, 45 minutes north of New York City and boy oh boy did the white stuff come down from December thru March.
I know that our memories can play tricks on us. That Totem Pole at summer camp wasn’t 20 feet high. (It was a twelve foot tree.) That’s why it’s entirely possible that when I was 4 feet tall my perspective affected my ability to gauge the amount of snow we had over fifty years ago. I might be misremembering a lot of other things, too
Our old neighbor, Lenny, played in the pit orchestra for The Phantom of the Opera for 17 years. One day, he told us that what he remembered from the thousands of performances were the times when something went wrong. This includes the time a family of mice ran across the timpani drums spoiling a tender love scene and, of course, the night that the huge chandelier came crashing down on the stage – or was it that it failed to come down? I misremember and have never seen the show.
My memory is super hazy when it comes to the pandemic, too. I recall the hoops we had to jump through to receive unemployment and the PPP and SBA loans, though. I remember parts of the technological learning curve I encountered in order to livestream our performances, too. During that time period, our industry was on life support, so like many others, my central nervous system was in a constant state of overload.
But the pandemic was also the time when Beth’s online yoga business became a source of income for us and inspiration for others.
While some suffered a lot, the pandemic also disrupted others in a sort of good way. Beth and I learned how to pivot, to get creative and be scrappy survivors. For us, the pandemic gave us the freedom to reinvent ourselves. In my mind, we developed the courage to let go of our home in that period and risk 8 months traveling in an RV – something neither one of us had any knowledge or skill to consider in the past.
We just did it.
I’ve heard it said that a big storm can lead to wonderful waves for surfers. A terrible event in one place, then, can be a wake up call for someone else far away. These moments can teach us or kill us.
And they can certainly be the stuff of great memories, no matter how imperfect.
