A reflection.
Purple skies at dusk, against the outline of trees & power lines. July 21st, Orlando, FL.
Summer goes beyond being a season. And it is not even a time frame shared by all people across our world, as in the global south, it’s pretty cool now. (Shoutout to our friends in Adelaide.) But here in the US, summer has come to take on many meanings. In addition to school not in session, it’s a time to make change. It’s a time to let things grow. It’s a time, somewhat engineered by our society, to slow things down, to take some things easy. This summer, some have felt the need to ramp things up, because things have been so slow or fraught for the last almost 18 months.
And now, before that tenuous ramp up into the school year, when it seemed like the world had gotten things figured out in the wake of a global pandemic, it feels like we’re close to where started in March of 2020.
I’ll be honest — summer is always a hard time for me. Too much unstructured time and I start to go places I’d really rather not go. And in the grand tradition of the pathetic fallacy, it’s a stormy time. It rains almost every afternoon here in Orlando during the summer. I start to think of travelling with everything we owned to New York and New Jersey summer of 1992, not knowing where my family would end up. I listened to my mom & uncle argue. I played Pretty Pretty Princess with my cousin while listening to a Madonna tape while everyone else watched the Olympics in the living room. My family ended up back in South Florida, mere days before Hurricane Andrew hit.
There have been other rough summers. In 2002, my father died in August. He’d been five years on the verge of dying, we were mostly estranged, and I thought I would feel relief when he died. I didn’t. Thank god for that year’s marching band season, or I don’t know what would have become of me.
But there have been good ones, too.
I think of 1996, where I felt so accepted in a particular peer group and I dreamed, I wrote, I had one massive crush, and I started to really hope for the future. Or I think of 1997, the summer before I started high school and after my grandfather had died, when we stayed with my aunt, uncle, and cousins out on Long Island. I went to New York City for the first time. We had so much fun.
In 2003, I went to Sweden with my college marching band. It was a weird trip, but also, an incredible one. Lots of me pulling the Samwise Gamgee, walking forward, and saying, “If I take one more step, I’ll be the farthest away from home I’ve ever been.” But it was amazing, and that trip taught me a lot. My roommate met her husband on that trip. And I think of the summer of 2004. I had a boyfriend for the first time ever really, and it was great to see shows around town and to get to hang out. Later in the summer, I took a road trip with my friend Andrea to Boston for a few weeks. Her dad drove with us, and we toured Civil War monuments the whole way back to Florida. Her father died almost exactly a year later, and I remain glad that we had that trip.
In 2008 and 2009, I took ambitious road trips that didn’t exactly line up with my summer pay schedule. That didn’t always make for a great end of July, but those were really fun trips.
I did my masters degree over the course of three summers, with the third spent in London in 2014. I had the most magnificent roommate, wonderful classmates who I cherish deeply, got to take side trips to Paris & Amsterdam, and I filled my nights with as many concerts, performances, and later Proms as I possibly could. I left for Edinburgh after classes finished, met up with my bestie who had criss-crossed Europe with many of us, and fulfilled a few dreams of seeing the Edinburgh Tattoo and Festival Fringe. I unboarded the plane in Miami totally exhausted, and a little overwhelmed.
I had my daughter the next summer, in June of 2015, and spent all summer at home with her. That was a bit of a change, but all that time at home prepared me for 2020.
In 2017 and for two summers following that, I got to attend the Association of Popular Music Education conferences in various locations, make new & brilliant friends, and get a better foothold on my future as a music teacher.
My family moved, husband, daughter, and mother in tow, with great promise, back up to Orlando in 2019. There was a lot to be excited about.
Last summer was one of the worst for me, for reasons that are obvious to everyone. We were lucky to not get sick, not even my high risk mother. No one close to me had to be hospitalized. Trying to square my survivor’s guilt with getting through what I went through over the last year is definitely a process I’m undergoing. In addition to (gestures grandly around), I was surplussed from my elementary teaching job in April of 2020. I was told I was going to get picked up quickly, and told that one of the reasons I’d been surplussed was that I’d probably get scooped up by another school soonafter. I didn’t. I had been hard-working, but also lucky before that, having interviewed for four jobs and gotten three.
Summer of 2020 was a constant search for employment, knowing it would be exceedingly tough for my family if I did not get a full time job. Part of that was connected to getting health care, as well. I am lucky enough to not have serious chronic illness that requires constant, expensive care, but I also did not want to take a chance in a raging pandemic. Interview after interview. And nothing, except one truly unacceptable offer.
But it was also wondering whether or not I would or even could continue being a music teacher. So much of what I’d built my life upon was falling out from under me. There were days I couldn’t get out of bed because I was crying so much. I started the school year unemployed, writing terrible underpaid ad copy for content farms & teaching lessons where I could. In a magnificent twist of fate, I nabbed full-time public school teaching job, fully online, remote, and asynchronously, for a county across the state. I enjoyed the job, and got to stay home with my kid as she did most of her school year online, but both of those situations also presented challenges.
I still feel guilty, a year out, for what my friends & colleagues had to endure while teaching in person here in Florida. A friend said to me, “But you did that, with your own kid.” It was hard, but we managed it. That being said, I wouldn’t wish the summer I had on anyone.
This past spring, I walked around downtown Orlando (while paying an overdue traffic ticket), past my vaccination efficiency date, and got excited for what the summer could possibly bring. And while there’s been good to be had, I am particularly starting to feel the weight of what could have been.
We’ve had some great things that have happened. Brief glimpses of life beyond pandemic. A lot of my friends got to travel. I got to help put on Orlando Girls Rock Camp in person (my first time doing so). But it’s looking like we’ll have to hunker down again, even as I’m preparing to go back to school to teach in person for the first time in almost 18 months. My kid will be starting 1st grade. There is a future to look toward again, so long as we can stay safe and push through to at least January.
Before I moved away and started college, 20 years ago this fall, I used to sit in my driveway in sleepy Deltona at dusk. I’d look up at the trees across the street from my house against a purple sky. I’d sit with my Discman and put the following song on repeat as many times as my old reliable machine would let me.
I’m not interested in new Smashing Pumpkins projects, and really haven’t been since 2007, and I know that Corgan is not someone to look up to, but I can live with the narrative that this band shaped my adolescence. I started listening to this song in particular again on repeat in March 2020.
“As you might have guessed / we won’t make it home.”
The world is not going to look the same when we’ve finally & truly beaten this thing. And for all of my dear friends posting about there’s no way that this could be the same heat we did marching band in 15-20 years ago, it’s not. The planet is getting hotter, and the outlook for that future is bad.
But what do we do if we don’t make it home? What do we do if everything shifts? What do we do if we have to find entirely new dreams? A lot of people have had to suffer through that as a result of the pandemic.
“Hesitation, no.”
We keep moving. I have spent too much time online from my adolescence onward, but even more so during the pandemic. What I have seen, along with questions of the worth of going forward, is a lot of people saying that what they’ve realized during this time is that they very much want to live. Even if it sucks. Even if it’s hard, and you don’t know where you’re headed. Five years later, you could have a very different outcome.
Through a lot of reflecting and a lot of goal setting, I have no clue what a real summer is, or what a real summer should be. Absent of friends & travel & hope for the future, it’s a lot of time to be left alone with your thoughts. Which is not always great, especially when the heat is oppressive and hurricanes or wildfires knock on your door.
But it can be a time to remember why you care about what you care about. If we learned nothing last summer from so many social movements, it’s that the effort to change the world, or even your own life, can always be redoubled. Maybe that’s what summer is for.
For me, today is the last afternoon I have to sit in my bed and write for a long time. Maybe until next summer. I start a new teaching job, back in person, back in elementary, on Monday. My kid starts school next Tuesday. Through a return to incredible luck, I start doctoral coursework on August 23rd. And we will hold on, mask up, and try to keep safe, with 3/4 of my household members fully vaccinated.
The fall always brings hope to me. It might be hard to find, but I hope if you’ve had some time to similarly reflect over the summer, you can find something to be hopeful for this fall. If you’re reading this, please know that I wish you the best, and I hope you enjoy the change of season.
Me, ready to raise some heck, helping to facilitate the Orlando Girls Rock Camp showcase on July 10th, 2021. Photo by my dear friend & BANDMATE Emily Fueger.