To Face Unafraid The Plans That We Made

Talking in a winter wonderland.

Hello. You’ve reached Time & Temperature.

I hope the holiday season is bringing you some joy amidst the chaos.

I’m taking a break from collecting firewood in the snow (it looks like we are gonna have a white Christmas in New York’s Hudson Valley!) to bring you an update on this throat surgery that I have been going on and on about. It has been a great success so far, but the recovery period has been weird — I had to go a week without speaking!

I never realized how much I talk, how much I love to talk, how integral speech is to my mental health. Let’s just say I like to say a lot. In the week following my vocal cord surgery I was allowed to say nothing. Wow. That was rough. But in saying nothing, you guessed it, I learned something.

My brilliant son Max has spent years encouraging me to listen more. The problem is that I love riffing, I love goofing… I have so many thoughts! And more importantly, SO MANY JOKES! But in the silence imposed upon me in the wake of my procedure, the jokes went untold, the goofs ungoofed, the thoughts unshared. And you know what? It was fine. Better than fine. It was magnificent.

Turns out, uninterrupted stories from family members are even better than stories where I get to walk my wit into what should be their spotlight. My kids Max and Soleil have always been pretty open about sharing their tales of their adventures and giving us glimpses into their inner lives, and my wife Erica and I have found ourselves marveling at their thoughtfulness and maturity. Unable to express my pride verbally, I have had to content myself with a giant smile and a surreptitious spousal hand squeeze.

I also had to figure out some way to communicate basic stuff. The text-to-speech app on my phone was insufferable. I spent hours listening to all the different voice options, and chose the least egregious, but even Nathan, my proxy robot voice, had a way of making people think I was angry and/or rude. I devised a plan, inspired by an idea my friend Ben Greenman offered up — I made a card with some responses I could point to. It worked great!

I added “GREAT IDEA!” when I realized that my favorite use of my voice, the one I missed the most, is for encouragement. Isn’t the purpose of a voice to lift each other up, make each other feel seen and supported? Music does this. But a simple “GREAT IDEA!” goes a long way.

“MAYBE” got a lot of use, as did “ICE CREAM,” obviously. I ended up never once utilizing “PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE,” but I’ll admit that it brought me some comfort just knowing it was there. A lot of “THANK YOU,” a bunch of “I LOVE YOU,” frequently in conjunction with “I’M SORRY” — not sure what that means, except that a convalescent during the holiday season ends up turning down many fun-sounding offers for parties, activities and, obviously, caroling.

But it has very much felt like the holidays this year. Perhaps in my compromised state I’m simply more grateful. Also, this is our first holiday to welcome two kids-turned-young-adults home from their college lives elsewhere.

Johnny Mathis sings “To face unafraid/the plans that we made,” and the lyric reveals a deeper meaning to me this year. You spin all these plots, thinking that the outcomes are unreachably distant, thinking that the future will always be in the future. And then the throat surgery that was scheduled months ago is here. And the week of silence that was such a funny joke when it was just a distant prospect is suddenly your real life. And the kids whom you once bounced on your knee and spoiled beneath the tree, are dropping their suitcases and rushing back out to see their friends. Never mind us how did the babies get so old? How did we get to the future so fast? Those crazy faraway dreams were all just plans we were making. And here we are, being asked to face them unafraid.

As for the throat, I’m healing great. As for the kids, they’ll be around the house a bunch the next few weeks and I’m so grateful for that. As for the winter wonderland? Well, all I can say is “THANK YOU,” “I LOVE YOU,” and “ICE CREAM.”

yrs,

Rhett