I distinctly remember that a year ago I felt well enough to be sure I was using the correct spelling, “plumb,” not “plum,” when I shared this photo of items that brought a little cheer during what was, in retrospect, the darkest time of my life. And the looking up, I suppose, is a sign I hadn’t lost it entirely.
But the previous week I had been weeping every day, preparing for a national conference that was a logistical nightmare. My colleague in the theatre department would call me in the morning to ask if I’d cried yet, and if not, could I wait until 2pm, because he’d be over then and we could cry together.
After we’d survived that flustercuck, I had an all-day Revels rehearsal. When I’d auditioned for the chorus the previous spring, I had thought that a summer of rest would put me in fine fettle to perform again. My fettle was anything but fine.
I don’t remember if they volunteered or if I asked, but my son Eli and his girlfriend Lindsey came to visit, fetching me at the church rehearsal space. And that, I suppose, is why, after we had packed into her little car and were setting off toward home that Lindsey announced, “I went to a mega-church once….”
“WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?”
I don’t remember her answer. But I do remember there was an actual camel at the church. Live. For the nativity, I guess. And people complained after we sheared a sheep onstage during a springtime Revels back in the day!
After recovering from the camel shock, I remembered the monstrosity out in Gig Harbor, the church where I heard the Symphony Tacoma Chorus sing The Messiah a week or so before the Mortal Peril. My friend Jinshil was performing, and she brought me along with her one evening.
I don’t remember much from that time, but I do remember reading a particularly steamy scene in Narcissus and Goldmund while the choir was warming up. And I remember the building. It was like an airport, or a carpeted shopping mall, with a coffee shop and bookstore.
I just kept thinking, they either hire an army of (likely brown) people to vacuum this place or they have some kind of space-age giant machine.
Of course I told the kids about that church, unlike anything I had ever seen. I suppose that’s what got us to thinking about IKEA. The enormity of the building, not the acres of carpet.
And then. Lindsey excitedly asked, “What if there was a church in IKEA?”
In response to which Eli intoned, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was hygge.”
It’s funny how crisis puts us exactly in a place where we cannot ask for help because we cannot see the extremity of our situation. All energy is focused on surviving each day. It was still a long struggle, the rest of that autumn a year ago. But the hygge moment was when I felt the suffering abate just a smidgen. For a moment I could see myself again and the everything was, well, not right, but a little less wrong in the world.