Quick Review 2018 – 2020

 

Quick Review 2018 – 2020

 

I know I won’t remember everything, but I want to give you a flavor for the antics of the Field family for the last couple years as we didn’t send out the annual Christmas / Holiday letter then touch on how things changed in 2020.

As I mentioned in this year’s letter, 2020 was going to be a year for a significant amount of travel.  This was a ramp up from the previous years, but those years were not with out their highlights. Lenora’s brother and wonderful wife got married in Sonoma in the early summer of 2018 and we took the opportunity to tour the Sonoma and Napa Valley wine country and visit friends who had relocated there.  Serendipity also moved England and Scotland to the top of the bucket list in 2018 as we visited London and Edinburgh with bus trips out into the countryside in both countries. The highlight of 2019 was a 5,000-mile road trip to Santa Fe, NM, and Moab, UT, with stops along the way out and back. We didn’t realize it at the time but being in a car for 3 weeks with just your significant other for company was our training camp for being in lock-down together this year!

We also had reunions: Michael’s 45^th college reunion at Cornell in Ithaca, NY, in 2018 and his 50^th high school reunion in Maine in 2019. We saw old friends and made new friends. Driving to the reunions allowed us to make big loops around the Northeast quadrant of the country. Both years, we spent a week at our absolute favorite summer destination, the Chautauqua Institution, in upstate New York. In 2019 we discovered a new contender for the favorite destination title in the close by National Comedy Center. Each year, we enjoyed seeing family, reconnecting with old friends and making new ones, and experiencing the sights of upstate New York, Vermont, Maine (including Bar Harbor), Cape Cod, Connecticut, New York City and points in between.

We mentioned in the letter that singing is part of our lives. We both sing in the church choir which, due to an abundance of musical resources in the congregation, only sings for services once a month. Lenora sings with the Concert Singers of Cary which programs a refreshing variety of classical pieces featured in several concerts each year. Michael started rehearsing with a Barbershop Harmony men’s chorus, Oak City Sound. Due to COVID shutting live performances down, he has not yet done a concert with them but has contributed tracks for their virtual performances and will join their board in January.

 Michael also sings with another men’s chorus, Down On The Corner, made up of residents in our Over-55 community which presents an annual concert featuring the music of the Doo Wops era. For the past two years, that group also sang the National Anthem for the local AAA affiliate, the Durham Bulls, made famous by the movie ‘Bull Durham.’

Michael also expanded his performing resume by singing in the chorus for two musical productions put on by the resident performing arts group. The group presented ‘Damn Yankees’ in 2018 and ‘Dirty Rotten Scoundrels’ in 2019. Michael was in rehearsals to be a Latin lover in a gender-reversed version of ‘The Odd Couple’ when COVID shut things down.

We have always strived to model for our children that life is about experiences, not possessions, and some of that has rubbed off.  For the past six years, the primary focus for Elizabeth has been getting her Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of Illinois, in Champaign-Urbana, IL. A wrinkle for her was her thesis advisor taking a sabbatical and then transferring to Hunter College in NYC. He continued to advise her, albeit remotely.  That was her introduction to the remote learning world that we all became way too familiar with in 2020. Elizabeth spent the spring semester of 2019 at Hunter, working with her advisor and teaching as an Adjunct Professor.  In a bit of serendipity, just when Elizabeth needed a place to live in New York City, her brother’s NYC apartment became available as he took an assignment in South Africa.  She split time between the city and staying with our dear former next-door neighbor in Fairfield, CT. The summer of 2019 was spent traveling to speak at conferences around the world, and the fall of 2019 involved traveling to speak at graduate seminars around the country as part of a job search for a post-doc position. Elizabeth has had a more exciting 2020 than most as she successfully defended her thesis, in the field of Geometric Group Theory, and graduated in May. Her research work and her teaching were both recognized with university-level awards. The job search was also successful as, out of four offers, she was able to accept a multi-year research/teaching position at her first-choice institution, the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, UT. Her few possessions went into a pod to be shipped and in July she drove out to Utah by way of the South Dakota Badlands, sleeping in a tent at campgrounds to stay isolated from the coronavirus.  Her graduation present from her brother and dear friend, Lisa, is a Tibetan Terrier puppy that at 4 months old knows more tricks than our Bella.

Evan similarly has had an experience filled couple of years. After graduating from the Univ. of Michigan in 2017, Evan joined the Anheiser-Busch (A-B) Global Management Training (GMT) program and spent 10 months living out of one suitcase as he was rotated through 10 different training situations, going end-to-end in both the process and the country, from a brewery in Georgia to a distributor in Seattle. His last training assignment, global finance in New York City in 2018 at the A-B parent company, InBev, also ended up being his first permanent work assignment. At the beginning of 2019, on two weeks’ notice, Evan and his one suitcase of possessions relocated to Johannesburg, South Africa, for a 3-month assignment. On the successful completion of that assignment, he was asked to stay for another year. In February of 2020, Evan returned to New York City for a position in international sales performance management. He returned just in time to be locked-down, working remotely from his mid-town Manhattan apartment. In a ‘romance trumps COVID’ story, his online dating profile was swiped by an equally hard-working young woman, Taylor Short, who was looking for a running partner as, with gyms shut down, running along NYC’s riverbanks was one of the few outlets available to serious fitness nuts. Conversations during pre-run stretching and post-run cool downs with rooftop beverages led them to discover many common interests that they are currently exploring together.

As mentioned in the letter, 2020 has not been a good year in so many ways. Yet the fact that the next generation - our legacy, our purpose – can not only survive, but can flourish in 2020 provides hope. And it is not an unfounded hope, but rather a well-founded expectation that our children, not just Elizabeth and Evan, but your children and their generation, will take the world they inherit and do great things with it.  Through Google, I discovered that the original meaning of being blessed means that you have inherited the world, but not in the sense of inheriting riches, rather in the sense of “You have inherited the world, now what are you going to make of it?” We are truly blessed, and we pass that blessing on to the next generation to make something of the world. 2020 has impacted our world, but the years past and the years to come will prove that 2020 has been a learning opportunity, a prism enabling us to see the spectrum of the world in a new way. May you use the insights learned in 2020 to make the world a better place in 2021.

 

Love and sincere wishes for a Happy New Year,

Michael, Lenora and Bella