Cari on… hindsight

Hello from a grayish May morning. I’m writing this from a place of happiness, contentment, and hopefulness. The teaching year is wrapping up, I have big exciting performances coming up, and SONOSYNTHESIS concerts in the works. My five month old puppy is laying contentedly in her bed next to me as I write this, and tomorrow is Saturday. My husband and I just celebrated the six year anniversary of us dating, and on Monday new dining furniture is being delivered. Adulthood!!!

Well that’s it! I’m doing great, blog over.

No, truth be told it was just a few days ago that I noticed (or even had the time and space to notice) that I was feeling happy and hopeful. Actually as I typed that I recalled more glimmers of light in the past few weeks, but isn’t that how hindsight works? It might be 2020, but it unfogs a bit at a time.

DECEMBER 2023

By the time I gave my SONOSYNTHESIS Christmas concert, I was tired. I was really already tired before then. “Cari, lots of people are tired in December.” Yes, yes I know. I’m telling you my story though, okay? If you want to share yours, drop it in the comments. So anyway I was tired, like really tired. That concert was a great success - we sold out, everyone enjoyed themselves immensely, and the multitude of moving parts went off without a hitch (unless you count the re-recording day of, Best Buy run during dress rehearsal, and hours of extra work in the days leading up to it).

So then I could breathe, right? No. The next day, my husband and our 11 year old pug mix Sydney drove to Texas. (20 hours, I know you were going to ask). It was a great Christmas with family, but not an easy one. My parents (who are reading this, hi Mom!!) were both having some health things. My mom had serious shoulder surgery just a couple of weeks before, and my dad was (still, months later) recovering from COVID with some symptoms which weren’t clear about whether or not they planned to stick around. It’s never easy to see your parents needing help and aging, but this was really the first time I was confronted with it so bluntly.

After Christmas, we enjoyed a few days in New Orleans together. We had a great time, ate amazing food, and paraded our sweet dog down Bourbon Street for her nightly walk.

The last night, she stopped walking and looked at me. I could tell she was in pain. She had arthritis that we had been managing well, and I was sure she was just having a flare up. She continued to be out of sorts, but what was there to do but take her home? She had a check-up scheduled anyway. I was also feeling out of sorts after all of this. But we took our fancy dining, jazzy memories and packed up to head home.

JANUARY 2024

So, we drove the two days back, went to the check up, and they showed me her x-ray. I may not know a lot about medicine, but I know that the entire x-ray of my dog’s chest shouldn’t look like one giant cloud. Somehow, without telling us until just a few days before, she had come to be made of cancer.

The last thing I could do for her was to let her go home and never have to go back to the vet (she hated it). “There has to be a way to do this at home,” I said to the vet. “Yes,” she said, “I have someone you can call.” And so the kindest person I’ve ever met came to our house, celebrated with us, grieved with us, sat with us, and took all of Sydney’s pain away. We buried her in the backyard wrapped in a burlap coffee sack.

And so, in addition to being exhausted, worried, burnt out, and overwhelmed, I was now also grieving. Grieving and going back to teaching, with a performance coming up in just a couple of weeks. No Sydney to cuddle at my feet in bed at night, no one to pet while my students played their scales, no Sydney to sit next to me while I read my books and drank my coffee every morning. No Sydney to sigh when I wanted to play through my piece one more time instead of taking her on a walk.

FEBRUARY - APRIL

As my dear friend said yesterday, “you had a perfect response to your circumstances.” I did fewer things, I read more books, I tried to have more meaningful social connection, and I didn’t plan a concert. And I certainly wasn’t posting every day on my flute Instagram. I played some gigs, I wondered if inspiration would come, and it didn’t. I was okay, I was grateful for everything in my life, but I was still a little less sparkly than I had once been.

And then one of my friends from Peabody (who, coincidentally, also went to the same undergrad, and also grew up in my hometown…) came to sing the Elgar Light of Life with Jeremy Thompson, my favorite pianist, and I was playing in the orchestra. And I wanted to talk about the experience and share our cute selfies. And so, I hastily dug through the past few months and shared a few updates. I wondered when or if I might do that regularly again. I thought about the evils of social media and how it would really be fine if I never posted to Instagram ever again, but really I just stayed on pause about the whole thing.

MAY

The Bach festival is approaching in earnest, and I realized that not only had I not put those events on my website, but I hadn’t put anything that I’d done this spring. I went from scheduled posting every day and a totally up-to-date website to being a ghost. And so, I’ve updated the upcoming events and I’m making this blog so that I can link it in my newsletter. And I’ve sent two emails about future concerts and been both invigorated and reminded of the burden of planning a concert. And yet, I’m doing it.

And then I woke up today and realized I’m just really happy. I still miss Sydney, I still remember how I felt after the December concert, but today I’m happy. And until circumstances change again, I expect to stay that way. I will enjoy the pleasure of finding new routines and settling into summer, I will savor the time I’m taking off from teaching just because and not for traveling. I will enjoy every tiring minute of the Bach festival, I will document as my puppy grows up. I will be frustrated and delighted as new programs take place and I will share about them joyfully and with the full knowledge that it is hard to be a musician, and yet that I am and will remain so. That I have work to do, and I will continue to do it.

But if you had told me in January that this moment would come five months later, and not after a few days of rest, I would have found that oppressively sad. And yet. I can now look back in hindsight and see how much giving myself all of that time to rest and recover was necessary and abundantly good. Sometimes doing the work means taking a break. And so I have done, and here I am. Thank you for joining me.