This morning, a friend of mine posted on Facebook a meme using the “white guy blinking” format. I can’t share the actual image since it was on a personal page, but basically the meme guy has his eyes open looking at the year 2019. He closes them, and there is a blank space. When he opens them, it’s 2023.
Anybody else feel that?
Perhaps it’s because it’s the first “almost-normal” December since our world was upended in March of 2020, but the turn of the year seems particularly momentous this New Year’s Eve. Although the “plague” is not gone, we are also not where we were then – or even where we were last year at this time. So many times during 2022 I have seen things finally resume that went on hiatus so long ago, or return to in-person meetings when they have been virtual for months and years. We have gotten back pretty much everything we once longed for. At least where I live, there is a temptation to simply treat the last few years as though they passed by like the white space in the blinking-guy meme, and we can pick up where we left off.
But we can’t.
Irreplaceable things have been given to us, to be sure. Yesterday, in a fully virtual community created in the summer of 2020 because people could not gather, I had the great good fortune to read a lovely role in Thornton Wilder’s The Long Christmas Dinner alongside some very special people. (Click on that link to see a 1976 film of the play and read the transcript. Bring tissues.) The community has become so communal that we are planning to meet in person sometime in 2023.
But irreplaceable things have been taken, too. The deaths are too great to face head-on, so let me say only that for every virtual The Long Christmas Dinner, there’s a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat that didn’t happen at our local community theater. (We saved the theater from closing, but it was, in the end, at great financial and relational cost. Certain things about it will never be the same.)
This is all not (despite the best efforts of current headline writers) “unprecedented.” Jonathan Malesic wrote, somewhat comfortingly, in a recent Substack post:
There’s a strong, misguided tendency in present-day discourse to amplify the bad, to suggest that we live in uniquely horrific times. I think it’s an attempt to prove that you’re a serious person, not some mindless Polyanna. But it’s narcissism, just the flip side of saying that we, out of all who have ever been, live in the best of all possible worlds.
No, we just live in the world, the only one there is. We ought to try to make it better in reality, but we shouldn’t start by making it worse in our imaginations. To give a fair accounting of our time here, we need to see the world for what it is: good, bad, everything.
However, what we must see is the world the way it is now, not the way it was then. There are some things we have had the curtain pulled back on that will never shut. There are some paths we have gone down which prevent us ever going down other paths. Would I take back all that knowledge in order to get next-day delivery from Amazon Prime? Probably not. Well, maybe.
Anyway, go watch The Long Christmas Dinner and see one family make irreparable choices – some good, some bad – over a span of ninety years of industrialism, illness, and war. I think I’ll let Wilder have the last word. Well, him and Ella Fitzgerald.
I shall never marry, Mother. I shall sit in this house beside you forever. As though life were just one long, happy Christmas dinner. . .I can’t stand it. I can’t stand it any more. I’m going abroad. It’s not only the soot that comes through the very walls of this house, it’s the thoughts, it’s the thought of what has been and what might have been here. And the feeling of this house of the years grinding away. My mother died yesterday, not thirty years ago. Oh, I’m going to live and die abroad.
Image: Unsplash
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