Silver Linings

 As the pandemic nears the end of its 2^nd year and seems to be barreling into its 3^rd year, it is easy to point to the negative ways it has impacted our lives. In this reflection, written to complement the 2021 holiday letter, I want to focus on silver linings. The clouds have been ominous at times and certainly have been persistent like Seattle’s weather, but there have been bright spots. Some were only bright when viewed in contrast to worst case scenarios, while some were truly illuminating.

Most of had to use Zoom or the equivalent platforms for work and/or social groups. While in many, many cases, an email or two could have replaced a meeting for the purposes of information transfer, people have clung to the meeting, physical or virtual, as it retains the human presence. Virtual meetings, for their part, provide the appearance of people being present.  Those of you who have attended Zoom meetings in dress shirts or blouses while wearing pajama bottoms know the term ‘fully present’ rarely applies.

In 2021, we had Zoom family gatherings, Zoom classes, Zoom church services, Zoom lunches, Zoom choir rehearsals, Zoom musical and dramatic performances, and the list goes on. I don’t think we specifically had a Zoom playdate for Bella, but Bella, Piper and Callie were on the family Zooms.

One of the silver linings to the pandemic’s dark clouds was that, as music venues closed, a lot of talented musicians performed live via online platforms making their music accessible anywhere. Many just livestreamed from basements or garages they had turned into ersatz studios. Several venues created online platforms to feature talent that would otherwise have been performing live on their stages.

Voices Café in Westport was one of those venues forced to go online to survive. I remain connected with the team that manages the Voices shows, and, through them, I ended up one Tuesday evening with the Zoom link to an online folk music performance. Louise is a booking agent in Asheville, NC, who needed a platform for the singer/songwriter acts she represents so she decided to create one. Her love interest, Bruce, a DJ for a Connecticut radio station, had moved in with her to ride out the pandemic. Their creation, Music My Mother Would Not Like, has now put on over 70 weekly shows featuring over 200 different artists. Louise does the booking and handled tech for the first shows while Bruce is the emcee introducing and interviewing the artists.  The show is presented on Zoom with a live feed to Facebook.  The audience is muted but is encouraged to have videos on and applaud the performers who can see the feedback on gallery view.  The chat function allows the audience to interact with Louise, Bruce, other audience members, and, after their sets, with the performers. Often Bruce will ask the performer during the set a question asked by the audience in chat. At the end of the show, the audience is unmuted for a final round of applause and live interaction with the artists.

I have watched over half of the shows and am now a follower of multiple artists I first heard on the show. Despite leveraging the platform to maximize interaction, Bruce and Louise were two-dimensional entities - voices and computer images only.  Over time, I had gleaned enough information to suspect that there was more to them.  Bruce had lived in Fairfield, CT, and it was likely we had mutual friends and shared experiences. Louise, having worked for the major concert venue in town, was a fixture in Asheville, one of our favorite NC places to visit.

Then serendipity hit. I had a conference to attend in a town near Asheville and it made sense to return that way extending the weekend. I reached out to Bruce and Louise suggesting we meet for brunch and was pleasantly surprised when they accepted.  We had a wonderful chat and parted friends.  Bruce and I never did discover that mutual Fairfield friend, but it didn’t matter as we had many shared experiences. Our conversation with Louise revealed a core of shared values and soon it came out that she was also a Unitarian Universalist.  Louise said we could drop her name at the concert hall as we were catching an act there that night. Bruce gave us a map, hand drawn on the back of a napkin, to navigate to the best seats in the balcony. In the end, neither were necessary but the person checking our vaccine cards got a kick out of Bruce’s map!

I am listening to the latest of their online shows as I write this and there is a palpable difference this time. Bruce is delivering his usual patter, but now I know where it is coming from. Louise is filling in details about the artists and I know that the concern for the artists that shows in her voice is genuine. It took a real connection for me to transition them from avatars to humans and I am grateful it happened.

As the pandemic drags on, there will be more and more examples where the lack of human connection in virtual events has a deleterious effect – remote learning for students, WFH – there’s even an acronym now for Work From Home, online performances, and others. Lenora and I have been fortunate that our circumstances have mitigated most of the downside. In fact, there have even been some upsides.

Many are familiar with non-degree educational opportunities targeted at older, retired ‘students’. Here, Osher Lifelong Learning Institute organizes classes through two of the local universities. Due to limited physical space, classes were limited in size, and one needed to be online the minute registration opened to get popular classes. One pandemic upside was that virtual classrooms allowed larger ‘classrooms’; for example, the class studying Broadway musicals was opened up to the 255-person Zoom limit.

Organizers had more flexibility as instructors no longer had to be local. As a result, the instructors for the two memoir writing classes I took this year were remote, located in Mexico and New York City. We had students from far flung places like Arizona and New Zealand join us enriching the class with their diverse experiences. 

One of the instructors, Joanne in New York, just had her memoir published this November. She has a life filled with interesting experiences but, again, the class was only seeing her bounded by the digital frame imposed by Zoom. Her students were cut off from a full appreciation of its richness.

When Lenora and I were planning our October trip to New York City, I reached out to Joanne to see if we could get together which was tricky as we there were a lot of moving parts.  Eventually we settled on meeting at a coffee shop in her East Village neighborhood which was convenient for us as we could easily get to the southern end of the High Line linear park, one of the NYC attractions we felt would be safe.  We took the subway down from midtown arriving early which allowed us to walk around the residential section of the village, always an eclectic experience.

It was a great pleasure to meet in person I had spent hours with online. Joanne is vibrant online but doubly so in person. I had brought a coloring book for Joanne’s toddler-aged daughter as I thought that, in a way, it was a form of writing journal, the pictures being prompts which allow the child to tell their own story trough color and textures instead od words. Joanne was touched by the gesture. Over the course of an hour of conversation, Joanne’s humanity was fleshed out on the framework our online interaction had built. In addition to being an instructor, she is a mother, a life partner, an employer, a friend and a neighbor.  Joanne had a chance to learn more about me, especially to see how my partnership with Lenora is an important part of my life.

I have been trapping some of my life experiences to paper, vignettes that may someday be organized into a memoir.  What the pandemic, and its silver linings, have taught is that fully living current experiences is more important than looking backwards. Life is about making connections. A connection can be as simple as linking two occurrences into an insightful observation. It can also be as uplifting as turning an online presence into a human connection with a face-to-face meeting as these two occurrences did.  Meeting Joanne, Bruce, Louise, and all the other wonderful people we encountered this year was a great pleasure and provided the insight that shared experiences are the essence of life.