Okay, I'm back.
I was feeling pretty sad around Christmas. Here is a weird thing that happened: I kept seeing the email from the sing-along Messiah coordinator saying "we can't sing this year but here is a link to the pictures from last year," and it kept making me cry. And I kept feeling silly for crying, because my family is all alive and my husband and I are employed, and in this year when so many people have lost so much I am going to cry about the sing-along Messiah??
The answer was yes, apparently. I started a post about it, about how keenly I was missing the physicality of making music with other people: jostling together onto the risers, feeling the orchestra warming up in the bones of my skull, directing my whole brain toward the task of singing difficult music with a crowd of other people, almost all strangers, who also know and love this glorious oratorio from almost 300 years ago. When the soprano part directs me to sing an A, my cricothyroid muscle stretches my vocal folds to juuuust about their maximum length so they can vibrate 880 times per second. I haven't found anything else that scratches the same itch.
Christmas is a reasonable time to acknowledge that it's important for us to be together in the flesh, I know, what with the whole Incarnation business. And it's never very helpful to play misery poker. But I felt like I needed to get less sad before I could say here that I had been sad. That doesn't make much sense, I guess, but brains are weird. And maybe I was not going to be at my most rational in the run-up to Christmas, when the darkest time of the year fell at the beginning of month 10 of the pandemic.
We had ice on Friday and snow overnight, and all of our lovely old Gladlyville trees are weighed down. There are fallen branches all over the place, with power disruptions and streets partially blocked and even a house fire nearby as a result of a downed power line (no injuries). This morning at 6:30 I was pouring myself a cup of coffee when there was a series of loud bangs and green flashes of light. I went outside in my bathrobe to see what the heck was going on, and my neighbor Becky (pleasant neighbor Becky, as distinct from crabby neighbor Becky) was also outside in her bathrobe. "Transformer explosion," she said calmly. "I'll call the town." Our other neighbor Linda came around to our side of the block to investigate (not in her bathrobe), and a fourth neighbor poked his head out to say he didn't have power. Yet another neighbor struck up a conversation when I went out to scrape off the car for the trip to church. It's been a long time since I had in-person exchanges with five people outside my family in the space of 30 minutes. I miss in-person exchanges.
So here I am, feeling a little glum and a little worried and a lot lonely. But I usually feel better when I am blogging than when I am not, so I am going to throw up a blog post and see if it seems to help.
Last year I felt so battered by the stuff our family was going through that I did not make any Epiphany resolutions, even though I am usually the resolutions queen or maybe even the resolutions empress. This year, though, I can feel the resolution impulse bubbling up again. I'll be back tomorrow to tell you more.
I’m glad you’re back. I don’t comment often, but I read regularly. And I’ve missed you!
Posted by: Jenny | January 04, 2021 at 06:54 AM
I feel like it's ok to be sad, even if overall your life is mostly ok. It's funny how some things just hit us in the wrong place and that's what starts the sad. I'm glad you're back and feeling better.
Posted by: mary d | January 04, 2021 at 08:30 AM
Yes. Certainly, over the fall of these long, strange, pandemic months, I have grown accustomed to the lack of certain things — the community of in-person church for instance. I have learnt to be ... comfortable, I suppose, with this new life. I was already primarily homebound, so there is that. Still, this loss of my one, primary, away-from-home engagement cut keenly. This Christmastide, I have been feeling that loss more sharply, like a toothache. The hymns and carols, the organ and candles .... one day, hmm?
Posted by: Penelope | January 04, 2021 at 11:11 AM
Glad you're back. I'd say it's OK to be sad even when others have it worse. Like that sign in the ER that asks how much it hurts, and the face is smiling until almost midway, for some strange reason? Less hurty still hurts, if that makes sense.
Re what catches us and makes us sad - I totally sympathize about the emails. I watched On Pointe with my kids, especially my 14yo dancer, and the show came full-speed off of the end of Nutcracker at Lincoln Center into the wall that was March and the temporary shut-down...and then April and the first Zoom classes.... and we all pretty much started crying. It was so viscerally real, and we were so SO sad for the naively hopeful students who thought they'd be back in time for end-of-term dances in May.... The parody song that said if we didn't take care, "It'll last until July-a" also makes us sad. So optimistic we used to be....
Posted by: mandamum | January 04, 2021 at 06:15 PM
Not exactly the same but memories about Beer and Hymns has been popping up on FB for me and getting me teary too. Wander over if you want to check out a post I made recently where they helped us with the Hallelujah Chorus last year. So fun!
Posted by: Angela Kauffman | January 06, 2021 at 02:05 PM