Today we had a graduation party for the little angel and her posse from The Emerald City. I had to check the archives from 2006 to make sure I had that right.

I can close my eyes and see them in a McDonald’s playplace at a second birthday party. At a Christmas celebration. At the playground. Dragging sleds up a hill. Giggling at the zoo. Cheering at a Royals game. Christmas. Sledding. Birthday party. Friendsgiving. Barbecue. Zoo. Apple orchard. Halloween. Friendsgiving. Christmas.

Elementary.

Middle school.

High school.

Births.
Deaths.
Marriages.

Divorces.
Cancer.
Jobs won.
Hospital visits.

Cancer.
Jobs lost.

Birthdays.
Friendsgiving.

Christmas.

And suddenly, a beautiful spring day.
Seven young adults.
Seven families.
Eighteen years.

We made each other family, because we had to. Because we had no one else in town. Because we needed someone to call to pick up a kid, to help plan a funeral, to move into a new house.

Today, watching the kids laugh with each other, standing with my dear friends, I wished I could tell new mom Rita about today.

Hey, girl. The kids’ll be alright.

I took my daughter to brunch today. We were both in a snow situation, having been scheduled to attend a DECA competition that was cancelled because really, it was very cold.

On the way back, the conversation turned to the pandemic, how it drags on and on and on and on and on. She told me she had to stop reading THE HILL WE CLIMB because she just couldn’t with that timeframe anymore. And that the year 536 has been declared the worst year ever to be alive. A volcano exploded and blocked out the sun. That killed all the crops. So people starved.

And there was a plague.

Even now I’m finding myself reading books about wars and the flu of 1918, because for some reason reminding myself that things have always been shitty and the only thing special about COVID-19 is that we weren’t expecting it. Plagues are actually pretty normal. It’s not, like, personal.

She wasn’t having it. “I can’t read about it,” she said. “I am so over it. I have almost a cringey response to any of it now. That happened when I was 15. I’m about to turn 18. I just want to get on with my life.”

And she should. She’s about to enter the most world-rocking period of her young life: off to college, trying on new identities, meeting all kinds of people her age thrown into the same situation. It’s thrilling and exciting — the exact opposite of the spirit-crushing black hole of terrified boredom we lived in for so long.

I push on that time sometimes, still. Just checking. But the grief, like all grief, is fading with every passing month. And thank God she wants to get on with her life. Thank God.

ONWARD.

At present, I’m sitting in my chair watching a singer perform a version of Smooth Criminal I’ve never heard before. The show is some form of post-midnight rocking eve. A host has combined a sheerish orange corset with baggy jeans. She dances, awkwardly.

Annie, are you okay? Are you okay, Annie?

I don’t understand why any of these people have agreed to do the show.

I don’t understand why I’m watching it.

2022 is here. The pandemic is winding down. My daughter is graduating high school. The same daughter who was a baby on the first night I wrote on this blog.

Annie, are you okay? Are you okay, Annie?

I’m going to be 48 soon. Well, my body is. My brain is hovering somewhere between 27 and 72.

Last year I was absolutely worried about dying from COVID on New Year’s. Then six days later, people scaled DC wearing horns and face paint. I spent a solid week questioning everything I knew about reality.

This year, I’m back to thinking I should really clean the bottom drawer in the kitchen and buy some new white candles.

You’ve been hit by/

And so it goes, as I begin the first year of my life after raising a child. I know people have been doing this forever, but I still need a minute to sit with that.

You’ve been struck by/

A new year, indeed.

A smooth criminal.

We left Wisconsin just before ten this morning. We should’ve left earlier — would’ve, if the parents had been pretty much anyone but us — but we didn’t, and that’s why I’m in the backseat, at least an hour from home at 7:52 pm.

It’s my daughter's shift, her first one. First on a roadie, first in an SUV and the first at night. The Boss is on the playlist, and she and my husband are singing, and for the first time this Thanksgiving trip, I don’t feel anything is expected of me. I don’t need to work, like on the way up. I don’t need to navigate or keep company. Drive or socialize or offer to dry, catalog the things not to forget when we pack or not mention at the dinner table.

I’m just back here, looking out the window at the stars and the dark trees, listening to the rattle of a gas station cooler and a shot suspension. Ari and Taylor and Elton and Lita, just like those shirts I’ve never really understood.

The back end of this Nitro sways like a cat with no back claws. It smells of cheap disinfectant because my husband spilled gas on his shoes. Roadside cottonwoods give way to Christmas lights at the frayed edges of the northern suburbs. Freddie Mercury tosses the mike to Vivaldi, culture lite in a minor key.

In the back of my mind, the pandemic rolls over and stretches out a talon, reminding me of last Thanksgiving, of all that crazy shit that went down in 2020 when it rose up and ruled the world.

But outside the window the lights battle for attention, and inside the truck my daughter sings about a lift kit, and we’re rounding the back stretch of her childhood. I swat the talon with a Twizzler to drive it back down deep until a different night as the city yawns before our headlights and we are home.

I’ve been to a few concerts over the past five years where I’ve realized that my favorite singers’ voices have changed. Aged.

They don’t sound the same.

I felt something like … grief, in that.

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Recently Lisa Stone in an Instagram comment referenced a post I wrote, God, over a decade ago, about the fall of the Disney princesses photography series by Dina Goldstein.

Lisa’s blog is still intact, so I had the bizarre experience of getting quoted back to myself from before Twitter existed. Her post is still intact, her link referencing my old blog is not.

 Why are these images so powerful? The insight that cracked me like an egg was Rita's:

"In real life, happiness is the time spent being thankful you aren't going through hell anymore. In real life, we don't know happy unless we've been sad, really sad, or really angry, or really sick. Once we've been all of those things, we learn to appreciate moments when nothing is wrong --- and see them as happiness instead of the status quo."

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This month, this November, this season of leaves falling, has hit me different.

Last November, I was, like all of us, confronting the reality of a lost year, lost trick or treating, lost Thanksgiving football games spent drowsing by your in-laws’ TV, lost Christmas mornings. Lost weddings and graduations and funerals. A million lost funerals.

Applauding strangers at 7 pm and hoping they would still be alive in the morning to go to the hospital and try to stop people from dying of a previously unknown disease.

Reading about the refrigerated trucks that became morgues, the triaged ventilators, the opaque X-rays. The things we’ve never seen before, that will be what we’ve never seen before until we use the word “unprecendented” again.

---

When I hear these artists sing, I wish their voices sounded the same.

But then I realize my voice doesn’t.

Even though mine echoes through a keyboard instead of vocal chords, mine has changed forever, too.

I grieve that, a little. That girl Rita used to bring the voice.

I wonder if the singers feel that way, too.

---

Because, truth be told, until Lisa commented I forgot what I wrote about the Disney princesses. I forgot about the time when I had a job and it was to write. There was a blissful decade in my life when my job was to notice important things. To comment. To care.

I remember the night Osama bin Ladin was killed. I found about it in the shower, around midnight. I stayed up, because I needed to write.

I can’t find the post now. The sands of the Internet have ever so gradually, post by post, tweet by tweet, pin by pin and snap by snap, covered it in other people’s thoughts, and not even the Wayback Machine can help.

---

I’m okay with losing my relevance.

I’ve realized I’m not okay with losing my voice.

I have a photo from at least a decade ago. A woman I knew and respected picked a word representing me to paint on my back at a conference, back when it was socially acceptable to do things like that.

She wrote: “Fierce.”

Since leaving blogging professionally and re-entering corporate America, I haven’t really felt fierce in a while. My dad once called me a heat-seeking missile, and I haven’t felt like that, either.

Until now.

I’m listening to an audiobook about an imaginary world where plants try to kill people. (Thank you, M.R. Carey.)

That seems fair.

Today I got my second jab. After a year fearing death, I expected to feel … more.

Maybe relief is not a dramatic emotion.

I breathed deeply in my car. It was cold; my nose felt raw from a year inside with my allergies to keep me company. All around me, people adjusted masks, exited cars.

We didn’t look at each other. I think we were afraid to jinx it.

The vaccine.

After a year trapped inside. Scared. Confused. Bored.

I’m not at this moment certain which of those emotions is the worst for humanity.

I seized my phone with my appointment text. I pressed down on the mask over the bridge of my nose.

I followed a man inside the pavilion.

I got my sheet.

I walked to the man with the thermometer.

“Happy vaccine day!” he said.

Tears sprang to my eyes. Vaccine day. I wasn’t sure how this would end. I didn’t picture a nice man in the pavilion of a retirement home. I didn’t see a whole year … gone.

I never thought I would question my mortality in my forties or fear for my teen daughter’s or husband’s life from disease so early.

I got the shot. I sat in a chair for fifteen minutes.

I went back to my car.

I removed my mask.

I cried.

Happy Vaccine Day. Indeed.