2020 Summer Retrospective- Dominic Naggar

A summer retrospective. Hm. Let me think. . .

Isolation.

Anxiety.

Influential people saying “unprecedented.”

Little kids in masks, eyeing everyone around them with concern.

Amusement parks without lines.

A shocking lack of anybody over 60 out in public.

Numbers rising on a screen with no indication of stopping.

That trapped feeling of waiting to wake up from a bad dream. The only catch is, when you wake up, the dream continues, and it repeats. You’re Bill Murray in Groundhog Day: every morning you reach for your phone and unlock it as you roll onto your back. The highway outside is a little quieter than it was a few months ago, and your room is a little smaller. Every morning when you open your phone, you’re greeted by the same headlines of rising cases and deaths as the pandemic does a victory lap around the United States, devastating every region from sea to shining sea.

That’s when you remember this isn’t all just a bad dream. It’s our reality now.

But that’s not my summer retrospective. 

My summer retrospective is. . .amazing.

To avoid the mobs of possibly infected people, I find myself stepping out of my car on Salisbury beach many times beneath a dark blue sky. A moment later, I’m on the beach with my bare feet on the cold sand and the salty breeze whisking through my bedhead. And a moment after that, the ocean explodes before me. The red sun bursts over the horizon and immediately sends its golden rays across the blueberry sky and its orange glow across the rippling waves. I pull my shirt off and run down the desolate beach, right into the ocean until the water is too deep to lift my feet and it trips me. I tumble into the ocean, and the cold doesn’t hit me until I’m fully submerged, at which point I stand up and, shivering, gaze across the water again. The sun has cleared the horizon quickly and glows blood red as it ascends from the sea.

Sunrise beach trips.

My summer retrospective is sitting in the back of an old pickup truck. Jaws flickers to life at the drive-in theater as a cool rain falls on Topsfield. Friends and I huddle under an umbrella with our masks on in the bed of the truck. Some guy in the row of trucks behind us yells at us to put the umbrella down, so we lower it to sit on our heads as the bed of the truck before us darkens, but where we sit stays light and dry. I find myself in the back of that old, clunky, “Fisher Price-looking” truck again, this time with a pizza and a box of Cards Against Humanity. The sky is pastel blue above us, but becomes orange and red further west as the sun sets over the Merrimack Valley. Lawrence Airport is perched above I-495, so we can see the headlights and taillights of rush hour commuters winding through the trees like snakes in the grass. The smokestacks of old Lawrence factories are silhouetted against the sunset, and the clean wings of Cessnas parked before us reflect the colors of the sky. I probably wouldn’t have gotten to see that if the world was in any state of normal. But having to be outside in order to socialize really gets the creativity flowing sometimes.

And so we sat in the back of the Fisher Price truck and played Cards Against Humanity well into the night.

My summer retrospective is the calming breeze that tumbles off of a lake. It feels fresh and I feel free, standing barefoot on the dock, away from the world that seems to be falling down. I spread my arms like I’m in Titanic; I dip my feet into the lake, and subsequently squirm away from the wolf spiders setting up shop beneath the dock. Once the shock has worn off, I lie on my back on the old wooden planks, and some otherworldly being drapes a glittery blanket across the glass dome of the sky. There are thousands of stars I’ve never seen before, and some come crashing down as I lie beneath them with friends. Every minute a fiery comet tears through the blanket, which is then quickly sewn back together into inky but beautiful darkness.

All the while, the fresh breeze rejuvenates our young lungs that had been breathing in the air conditioning and scents of our own homes for far too long. 

To anyone reading this, if you’re still there: No, this hasn’t been building up to a big “Look on the bright side!” No. 

This sucks. Plain and simple. 

But you forgot for a minute, right? In the sentences between mentions of masks and sickness? You forgot we’re living in a bad sci-fi movie.

I know I did.

We’ve all sat through English and history classes on how to interpret events and stories. If there’s one thing to take away from those, it’s that you can interpret any scenario however you want to. Interpretations are individual and they’re endless. While you might not have any control over Moby Dick or the presidential election of 1800, you have total control over what those things mean to you, and what you learn from them.

Most of us don’t have any control over when there’s going to be a vaccine. It will come. But it hasn’t yet and it isn’t going to next week. Until then, we have to make the best of this bad movie. Maybe you don’t have to look at the grand plot: A race of scientists to develop and mass-produce a safe vaccine, a feat that might just be the most impressive accomplishment in human history, if done correctly. 

That sounds stressful to me and I’m not even in the room where the details are being discussed.

Maybe you gotta look at the subplots to distract yourself from the stress. Make this a really weird coming-of-age-during-a-crisis story if you have to. I guess that’s kind of what I’ve done.

Aside from being safe, the most important thing to do is to find ways to forget. Seize the free time you have to do whatever makes you forget, even if it's just for a minute. Because time’s a precious thing, and we learned in March that anything can be taken away at any moment. For the longest time, going to school was one of the most fundamental and constant things in our lives, and that was pulled away without much warning.

But it will come back. Life will go back to the way it was. I don’t know when, but I’m confident that stressing about it won’t bring it back any faster.

Until then, find ways to forget, and we’ll be okay.