Field Family Holiday Letter 2021

This is the 2021 installment of the Field Family annual holiday letter.  Years ago, we stopped mailing out physical cards in favor of emails which had the collateral effect of replacing short, heartwarming, personal messages with this long, impersonal, canned message.  We swapped our hand cramps and hundreds of dollars in postage for an electronic missive that your spam filter will likely put in your junk mail folder. Such is progress.

Most of us regarded 2020 as a lost year as we spent the bulk of the year in lockdown of one form or another. Well, let me introduce you to 2020’s cousin – 2021. And pundits are reminding us that the coming New Year is pronounced 2020 too!

If you came here looking for a litany of travel and life events, this is not shaping up to be that kind of holiday letter. Lenora and Michael are both about as good as could be expected. One highlight of the year was Michael turning 70.  Evan surprised him by flying in unannounced and Michael was treated to an Outer Banks sailing adventure. Elizabeth is integrating with her Utah community by being one step away from certification as a respite foster parent.

We did manage to squeeze in a handful of trips and attend a few cultural events between surges of COVID. In lieu of activities, we focused on physical fitness and quality of life. We are deacquisitioning material things and collecting experiences. We took joy in heartwarming things like reconnecting with old friends who recently retired to North Carolina. We picked up where we left off as if the intervening decades hadn’t happened.

This year started with a lot of promise as the vaccines were on the near horizon, something we all thought would bring a return to ‘normal’.  For us, the arrival of 2021 was quiet, with just the three of us, Michael, Lenora and Bella, in Cary – I don’t think we even stayed up until midnight.

January was spent trying to get an appointment to get the vaccine. Rather than making this letter endlessly stultifying, for this and other topics I am going to put the boring details into separate documents which will be posted to my blog page. The bottom line is that, through a combination of diligence and serendipity, we each got our first shot the last week of January and our second shot on Valentine’s Day.  At the time, we were elated as a year of stress was seemingly ended. We could shop, we could congregate, we could travel, we could be human.

Looking back at the calendar for the first quarter of the year, I am surprised at how many entries there are as the perception was that our lives were empty. I remember saying at the time that we were doing just enough to stay sane.  Our community clubhouse was allowing people in only to use the gym and the pool. We were rigorous about using our allotment of 4 pool times and 4 gym times each week which required setting the alarm for 6:30 AM on Fridays when the next batch of appointments opened for online booking.  The lockers were not available and the clubhouse doors wouldn’t open until the exact minute the time slot started, so we would be standing outside wearing only bathing suits and cover-ups shivering in the winter cold. After 45 minutes in the water, we were hustled out in now wet suits to make a dash to the relative warmth of our car.

Most days, many hours were spent on Zoom as meetings and events continued to be virtual. For the most part, this was not a satisfying experience, but it was better than total isolation. Choir rehearsals, for example, were ‘one way’ as the director would lead a piece while each chorister ‘sang’ to their computer screen while muted.  Performance pieces required that each singer record their voice individually to be compiled with the other choir voices electronically.  While the results were generally very good, the process was nerve racking requiring take after take until you gave up stiving for perfection and submitted ‘good enough’.

Church activities remain a significant part of our life despite/because of the pandemic. Midyear, Lenora transitioned off the board of trustees while remaining on the Foundation board. Michael was again co-chair for the pledge campaign. This year the watch word for our church, as for many organizations, has been ‘pivot’ and so it was with the pledge drive. One example is, of necessity, using a recorded Zoom session to gather testimonials from a diverse set of congregation members. The trick was to transform a Zoom meeting into a spiritual event that would elicit the participants’ authentic feelings.

One activity that did work remotely was online learning. As lifelong learners, we both signed up for OLLI classes – for Michael, a continuation of writing classes and the study of Broadway musicals; for Lenora, a discussion on racial justice. One outcome was Michael’s first published piece, an essay on a lobster dinner al fresco, which was ‘printed’ in the online community magazine. [turn to page 5]

Spring saw the expansion of vaccinations from seniors to other age groups and our relief grew as the kids were able to get vaccinated. Evan and his girlfriend, Taylor, are living in a high rise in the theater district of New York City (across the street from what us old folk call the Ed Sullivan Theater, but which now says Stephen Colbert on the marquee as he tapes his show there.) New York went from being one of the least safe places to one of the safest through good policies including ready availability of both vaccines and testing. When Salt Lake City opened an arena-scale vaccination site, Elizabeth volunteered to work there and was vaccinated during training which gained her a couple days before her group qualified.

With family vaccinated, travel became feasible. The highest priority for us was to visit Elizabeth in Salt Lake City and that trip turned out to be the high point of the year. Again, the details will be in a separate document. We decided that it would be safest to drive which also allowed us to take Bella. We spent five days on the road eschewing tourist stops on the way for safety. One aspect was that, as we were on the road, the CDC released the controversial finding that vaccinated people did not need to wear masks. Actually, it wasn’t the finding that was controversial but rather the release as, immediately, everyone, especially unvaccinated anti-maskers, stopped wearing masks. There is no such thing as a ‘partial’ or ‘relaxed’ mandate and masking requirements for public spaces were quickly either dropped or rendered moot. That resulted in a significant change to the calculus of how safe traveling would be for us; however, as we were already avoiding contact whenever possible, we pressed on.

It was great to see Elizabeth in her new location after two years of separation. It was a fun treat, especially for Bella, to meet and play with our granddog, Piper. We determined that Salt Lake City is our new favorite place to visit as the city is clean and friendly with a plethora of parks while the surrounding snowcapped mountains are beautiful. And Salt Lake City kept its mask mandate in place! We took a side trip to Sedona stopping at Zion on the way. Sedona was also our jumping off point for visiting the Grand Canyon. After about three weeks in Utah and Arizona, including a day trip to Bryce Canyon, we headed back taking eight days on the road for the return trip stopping to visit with friends and family.  In all, we visited 8 National Parks / Monuments / Museums, enjoyed multiple state and local parks, drove through 16 states while sleeping in 10 different ones, saw friends from all phases of our lives including childhood and college, and reconnected with family including quality time with our daughter.

Heady with this newfound ability to travel, we hurriedly made plans to go to the Chautauqua Institute for a week devoted to studying how to heal the divides in America.  We had cancelled in 2020 then said “No” when asked earlier this year if we wanted to join our regular group. Not wanting to continue depriving ourselves, we set off on our own buoyed with confidence in our ability to control unnecessary exposure. Chautauqua used the equivalent of a vaccine passport such that, at public events, we were only with other vaccinated people. Our housing had a kitchen allowing us to eat our meals in.  The lectures, as usual, were thought provoking, the cultural events were curtailed but entertaining, and the scenery was charming as we walked the grounds.  All in all, the week was so uplifting, especially as we were desperate for soul satisfying experiences, that we booked the same housing unit for two weeks in 2022. And we discovered that Bella can come with us! Based on casual observations, the labradoodle is the official dog for Chautauquans. We continued our practice of using our trips this year to reconnect and stopped on the way back to see a childhood friend of Michael and a high school friend of Lenora, someone she had not seen since graduation.

These times are full of irony. In July, Michael shared a reflection at church in which he reflected on what he had learned from the pandemic. The occasion was one of the first services in which the officiants were back in the sanctuary, albeit with a limit of ten people in the building. The irony is that he felt that the end was in sight and that it was time for retrospectives. Delta would force services back to Zoom shortly after that. The takeaway of the reflection, available on the blog, is that we all need human connection.

The middle of the year found us caught in a bizarre crosscurrent as the emergence of Delta effectively closed the window on travel while state and local policies, based on trailing indicators, loosened masking mandates. One example was Michael’s Barbershop Harmony chorus. We went from Zoom rehearsals to rehearsing live, wearing masks in a parking garage (interesting acoustics!) Then the senior living center we rehearse in opened their doors again to vaccinated, masked people and our face-to-face rehearsals resumed. Having opted not to perform as a group, many of us still attended a regional BHS conference where Michael sang live on stage for the multigroup finale. We had arrived at the venue to find the local mask mandate had been lifted but the conference’s mask requirement remained in place. Our rehearsal space has subsequently dropped their mask requirement and we officially have a ‘masks optional’ policy. This Xmas season we have been caroling at a local mall wearing masks. Both our church choir and Lenora’s community choir performed their holiday season concert wearing masks singing to a masked audience despite the lack of any government mandate.

In the fall, the travel window reopened with the availability of the booster shots which we got as soon as possible. The booster enabled us to travel to New York City where we stayed with Evan and Taylor. We had a wonderful visit going to Broadway shows, museums, Central Park, seeing old friends and new, walking the High Line, and most importantly, having NYC pizza. A story of our adventures is in Michael’s blog.

The theme of this letter is reconnection as 2021 has been marked by a Yin and Yang struggle. The waves of the pandemic have continued to thwart our human need for personal connection while our persistent human striving to overcome obstacles has driven us to take what opportunities for connection present themselves. One example for us has been our taking advantage of silver linings during the pandemic. This is explored in a separate document; the synopsis is that necessity forced a whole host of people to share their gifts via online events. Music, lectures, consulting, exercise sessions, etc. were all available on Facebook and Zoom. One downside was that these talented people were experienced only as Hollywood Square-like boxes, framed images that revealed little about their subjects. In two cases this year, we were able in our travels to meet people that previously were just thumbnails on our electronic devices. We had a delightful meeting with Michael’s OLLI memoir writing course instructor (and her family) at a coffee shop in the East Village. When in Asheville, we had a stimulating conversation over brunch with a couple who host a weekly, online, folk music showcase which has featured hundreds of musicians over the pandemic months. The pixels on the computer screen had rendered their images but not their humanity. It took meeting them in person to experience that and for that we are grateful.

The reopened travel window also allowed the kids to come to North Carolina for Thanksgiving. Evan and Taylor drove down from NYC and Elizabeth flew in from SLC. Elizabeth was able to transport a puppy, a half-sibling of Piper, from the SLC-based breeder to the very happy new owners in Raleigh. Elizabeth and Taylor quickly bonded over sharing gluten-free recipes. By having everyone make their own side dishes, everyone was happy especially Michael who did the stuffing.

Having the kids home for Thanksgiving gave us an excuse to put the Christmas decorations up early. The tree was in place for the kids to decorate with ornaments. We have brought the New England tradition of simple white candles in the windows to our new home in the South. For us, the symbolism is the importance of tradition and ‘home’ in our lives as the candles’ glow signifies the warmth of generosity, expresses gratitude for our prosperity and security, and holds out the promise of peace and love radiating out across the world. May the light from our candles illuminate you and yours wherever you may be and remain in your hearts throughout the New Year.

May the blessings of the holidays flow throughout the New Year!

Love,

Michael, Lenora, and Bella

You are invited to check our Facebook pages for pictures but, for your convenience, a couple are included here.

Family at Thanksgiving

Evan surprising Michael at 1:00 AM on his birthday then going sailing

The kids