Lately I’ve been listening to the album “Impressions from Paris to Prague” by Brian Crain, one of my favorite pianists. (“A Simple Life” is hands-down my favorite track, but there are lots of good ones.)
There’s some instrument that sounds a bit like a harmonica in most of the songs—it just screams casual evening music on European street corners.
Makes me feel like traveling again, but I wonder if or when we’ll get to in the forseeable future with the seeming perma-pandemic. That kind of freedom feels like a pipe dream now. Last year, I told my sister that I hoped we’d get out to visit her in Scotland this summer. Not a chance, though, with the cost, required quarantines and soon required vaccinations.
Sometimes it feels like I have already been through the “good old days” of my life, even though I spent many of them impatiently awaiting the future.
I know it’s not true, because I firmly believe that the best days of my life are being and will be spent raising my children, in whatever circumstances.
But I miss the “before,” too. So much we took for granted. I feel for today’s teenagers and college students especially, missing out on all the milestones and experiences that define your coming-of-age years in the US. Most of the defining experiences of my late teens and early 20s—my dad’s wedding in Italy, my first (wild) term at Carleton, meeting and getting to know Eric, all of our travels, heck even buying a house in the market these days!—wouldn’t have happened in these new circumstances.
I wonder why it has to be this way. I don’t want my kids to grow up in a masked, mandated world. Kids need freedom. Kids need to be able to live fearlessly and innocently. I want to protect them from the fear, give them some sense of normalcy.
I wonder how far I will have to go to do that.
I feel that the pandemic has already taken me, mentally, to places I did not think I would ever find myself. And some physical places as well.
As I stood in the tall waving grass of cow pastures last weekend, talking with our farmer about the Weston A Price foundation, holding glass jars to pick up our raw milk order, I was again surprised at myself. Rejecting the fear that milk straight from the cow is dangerous—rejecting many of the industrialized myths around nutrition. Who is this unafraid person that I hardly recognize?
How far can we and will we travel, mentally and physically, to give our kids the best lives we can?
xx