Remembering what we love as we slog through what we hate
I stepped into a golden afternoon recently to meet up with my friend Helen, a bright young woman with a wide smile and a new bakery who needed some photos for her website.
Because of COVID restrictions, it had been months since I’d done a photo shoot. And I was apprehensive.
Physically and emotionally depleted from months of COVID isolation, up against my serious health condition and my estranged husband’s serious health condition, up against financial and legal changes and shifting living conditions with my children — I wasn’t even sure if I had the stamina to lift my heavy equipment for an hour.
But as soon as I picked up my camera, all else fell away.
“Tilt your chin,” I said to Helen. “Now run your hand through your hair. A little bit more of a smile. Ah, that’s it. So beautiful!”
For an hour, I was not the sum of my COVID fears.
I was doing what I love, as I climbed onto a chair, bent through the sun-dappled trees and beamed at Helen. Helen relaxed and loosened into the shoot. And we locked into the synergy that emerges when two people are creating something beautiful together.
Helen was pleased with the photos, and later, she surprised me with a takeaway I wasn’t expecting: “I wish I’d had a camera myself while you were taking my pics,” she texted, “so you could see your face and expression of complete happiness.”
On another day as fall was turning, my son thought to ask our neighbors to bring their new puppy to meet ours.
Marly and Rosie initially circled and sniffed each other as my son, his friend and I, along with our neighbor and her daughter, watched from the chairs we’d physically distanced in the backyard.
Skeptical at first, the pups quickly took to chasing each other in the leaves, jumping on each other, twirling and twisting in the air, tumbling and romping like happy toddlers.
I don’t know who was more surprised during the hour they played, the puppies or their masked owners, giddy to discover such fun – and fundamentally unrelated to COVID.
On a Zoom call with a church support group recently, several of us talked about fun, a concept adults have trouble conjuring up even without a pandemic in the air.
“What does fun mean to you?” the moderator asked.
“Something that takes you outside your usual have-tos,” someone said.
“Something that has no end-goal,” said another.
“Anything that makes you laugh.”
“Anything that makes you feel like a kid.”
I thought of tripping along a creek bed, pretending to be an explorer, like I did when I was a little girl.
I thought of crocheting crazy patches of yarn together, no project in mind, just for fun.
I thought of singing along at the top of my lungs with Freddie Mercury to “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
I thought, too, of how hard I’ve tried all these months to find fun. And how my attempts have often fallen flat. Which may be because I was trying too hard.
Kids don’t try to have fun. They just do.