After a long and successful career as a restaurateur, I expected my retirement to be one of music making. That goal was looking good pre-covid! I had joined a couple of choruses, had begun singing at open mics around town and at piano bars at a local jazz club, and I had started music lessons with a fantastic musician. I was on the lookout for a new fiddle teacher, and I was getting some understanding of the piano under my belt. I had friends, I had parties, I had rooms, I had passions, I had my health.
I would happily end my years right here in the suburbs just north of New York City. Or so I thought.
To understand how covid has affected my future, you have to understand how covid affected my past 18 months. I’ll try to keep that story brief, but I do think it is an important story to hear, and one that is seldom told.
We were all still paying this new virus no mind at the end of January 2020, when one of my choruses had our first performance scheduled.
At dress rehearsal three days before the concert, I developed a tiny, but irrepressible, cough. The cough remained tiny for Friday and only slightly more pronounced on show day, Saturday. The show must go on, coughing or no, right? So off I went to the performance, regularly inhaling essential oils to suppress my cough, and to protect others from contagion.
We were brilliant.
Later that night, I had a fever and I was coughing my brains out. As a person who is considered elderly by all official measures, I had this thought: “Old people get pneumonia easily! I have to be careful!” so into bed I went. I did what I usually do for cases of the flu, and I fully expected to be fine, as I always have been whenever I caught a virus, by the sixth day.
I felt much better by Wednesday, day seven, so I kept a long-standing doctor’s appointment. I thought that I was fully recovered from whatever virus I had had. My temperature at that visit was 101 degrees! I still had a mild cough. I confidently announced to the doctor that I had the flu. He responded “It’s not the flu. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not the flu.”
Was it covid? It sure would have been counted as covid, had they been counting such things back then.
A few days later, cruise ships were being quarantined, toilet paper could not be purchased, and I was completely back to normal. None of the other singers, who stood close to me as I belted out our songs at both our dress rehearsal and our performance, got sick. No one who consorted with me at the after party got sick.
Then I was robbed. Yup. Robbed blind. Not of money or stuff, but of my social life. All of it, gone, in a week’s time.
There was nowhere to go. The music club closed. The open mics were canceled. The choruses shut down. Musicians started being blamed for the spread of covid, and singers had been forbidden to sing. Restaurants all but closed, except for take out. Neighbors stopped being neighborly, and we all kept our distance from everyone else.
Covid decimated my social life. I spent days on end all alone. But, certain I had already had covid, I was completely unafraid.
I can’t imagine what it must have been like for seniors who were living alone AND afraid. But I have a propensity toward joy, and I was fear-free, so I set out to find the silver linings of covid. I went inward. I found the pulse. I learned that, wherever I am, I am surrounded by community in the form of wild life. I learned that a cricket on asphalt can give me company.
I could have become very depressed. I could have felt trapped. I could have been terrified and paralyzed. Instead, a world of options opened up - without my social life, there was no reason to stay in these parts, where it is extremely expensive to live.
I looked in Tennessee where one of my daughters lives. I looked in Vermont where my other daughter lives. I looked in central NY where my family has property. I even considered Iowa, so that I could be close to my dear Hive friend @carolkean. I could go anywhere. It was exciting.
The big change in my future lies in where I will be spending it.
I have purchased a lovely house in a very small town in the foothills of Appalachia, where I was born and raised. A town I swore I would never return to.
Two weeks from yesterday I will be there. Yikes!!!
This is my entry to the Blog of the Week Contest sponsored by the Silver Bloggers community. Come write with us old folks! You don't even have to be old!
Both images are mine. Thanks for stopping by!