‘I just felt like there was absolutely no purpose to my life’

Jim Tompkins-maclaine considers himself lucky. He still has a fulltime job as a music teacher at Eastlake High School in Chula Vista and a part-time job as music director for United Church of Christ in La Mesa. But when the arts world shut down in midmarch, a big part of his life disappeared, and that’s been hard to deal with.

Besides his school and church gigs, Tompkins-maclaine had several musicaltheater-related jobs he did after school and on Saturday and Sunday afternoons with area arts groups — J Company, San Diego Junior Theatre and Young Actors’ Theatre, to name a few.

At 62, he’s used to living an active life — “I’m always busy!” he exclaimed. But with COVID-19, “I just felt like there was absolutely no purpose to my life. It frightened me a little bit. I’ve never been an unhappy person. It messed with my routine. I live by routine. I know where I’m going to be on Thursday night every week. I’m going to be at church choir. I know on Wednesday night, I’ll be at Baja Betty’s with friends. Almost every night, I have a place to be, especially when doing a show.

“All of a sudden that was all taken away.”

“It kind of brought along a little depression,” he said from his Kensington home. “The perfect word is malaise. All of a sudden, I’m home all day teaching from the computer and then not going anywhere at night for rehearsal, I didn’t know what to do with myself.”

Quickly, out of necessity, he found things to do. He cleaned the house. He worked on woodworking projects he’d been putting off. He worked on jigsaw puzzles — “a lot of jigsaw puzzles!” He watched movies. He cataloged his entire music library at church. And he worked on a new arrangement for a four-piano quartet.

A diabetic, Tompkins-maclaine found a silver lining in the pandemic: “I’m overweight. I have taken this time to plan my meals better, to measure my glucose on a regular basis. I’ve lost some weight. I’ve learned how to eat more responsibly. I haven’t been to a fast-food place in four months, and I haven’t missed it.”

And “luckily,” he said, “when all this happened, I was still taking my paycheck from church and school. I used my musical theater money to pay down my student loans — a lot of student loans.”

The new school year started in early August, and his biggest worry was “how the heck am I going to teach choir over the computer?” Now in his second year at Eastlake, he has about 140 students in show choir, concert choir and guitar classes.

“In the 42 years I’ve been teaching,” he said, “this has been one of the most challenging things I’ve gone through. I’m gonna lose some students, especially in the choir, because none of us have ever done this before. Some people are scared by change. I’m not. I’m anxious but excited at the same time. But like any other teacher, I miss that real-life interaction with students in the classroom. I definitely miss that.”

Never one to dwell on the negatives, Tompkins-maclaine turned philosophical when asked what he’s hoping for in the near future.

“I would say for everything to go back to normal, but let’s face it, we don’t have a normal anymore. But I want everything to come back and be better,” he said. “I feel like this whole time we’ve been secluded, a giant rain has washed all over us. Look at us as a society. We are dealing with some things that we’ve been brushing aside for years. Now we have time to sit and talk and change things. I think some of that change is very good. Some of it is upheaval, but I think we’re gonna come out on the right side of this. I just think it will take longer than we want it to take.”