Everything old is new again

The universe is conspiring to tell me something, to impart some wise lesson to remind me what this season is supposed to be about.

I felt a twinge of it with the first snowfall of the season. I woke up to a beautiful wonderland blanketed with snow and something bubbled up inside me. Instead of checking the temperature and worrying about levels of antifreeze in my car, I poured a second cup of coffee, sat in my comfy chair, and swiveled to face my picture window. Everything was still and sparkling and bright, while I sat in jammies and slippers thinking how lucky we were to have a cozy house.

Was this … childlike wonder I was feeling?

While rifling through an old, rusty recipe file that I unearthed from my grandmother’s things, I came across a beloved old recipe: my Aunt Annie’s No-Roll Pie Crust. I’ve made this recipe for years, ever since my sister passed it along to me as a newlywed. But I paused to look at this version, written in my grandmother’s loopy handwriting and I noticed an aberration from the familiar: while the version I’ve been making for 30 years has no sugar, my grandmother’s writing included a tablespoon of sugar among the ingredients. How could this be? Over the generations, who took the sugar out? And why? A few weeks later, I decided to make some pies. I’ve made so many over the years that I have the recipe committed to memory. But this time, I remembered seeing that one tablespoon of sugar. “Why not?” I thought to myself. I carefully measured a spoonful of sugar into the dough and shrugged, thinking one little spoonful of sugar couldn’t make much of a difference.

I was wrong; a spoonful of sugar makes all the difference. It transformed the pie crust into something else entirely, not only in taste but in texture. Eating that pie, I felt the earth shift beneath my feet. Somewhere, muscle memory kicked in, and I was eating a slice of pie back at my grandmother’s dining room table, laid with her best silver and delicate tea cups. 

Once again — childlike wonder.

As the community choir I’m in prepares for its biennial performance of Handel’s Messiah, I’m realizing that, in my third go at the piece, I’m starting to get the hang of it. The words are coming more easily; the notes are nestled like sugarplums in my head, and it allows me to hear musical phrases and appreciate the way the four-part harmony works together to form a tapestry that has endured all these years. Later, when we trade our dingy rehearsal space (always boiling hot or freezing, never in between) for the grand performance hall with its high ceilings and dazzling chandeliers, the music will be transformed again. The soloists will stand before us in their sparkly gowns and dashing tuxes, and a full orchestra will spread before us, bows at the ready, timpani mallets waiting expectantly in the air. I’m already looking forward to that moment when the first notes float through the air. It will take my breath away.

Adulthood is so much better than childhood in countless ways, but the wonder that comes fast and furious when we are tender younglings fades rapidly as childhood breaks free from our grasp. Age comes, and we find comfort in our routines and we feel more “settled,” but the inner child is still inside … the universe has been shouting that adulthood tends to obscure our childlike wonder. It’s our duty to look a little harder for it.

My husband, a trumpet player, has been in the market for a new horn. For several weekends, he visited music stores in the area, trying horn after horn, evaluating the feel of it in his hands, the sound, the brightness of the tone, and of course, the price. Each time, he came home empty-handed. “I couldn’t find the right one,” he’d tell me.

On a whim, he reached out to an acquaintance he sold his old horn to, fifteen years ago.

“Do you still have the horn?” he asked. 

“Yeah,” the man answered. “Why, you want it back?”

“Well … sort of. I mean, if you could part with it.”

Fifteen years later, my husband is reunited with one of his first trumpets, a B-flat Yamaha with gold lacquer, bearing battle scars from college days, grad school, and his first years of teaching. It’s the horn he played when I met him. It’s the horn he played when we fell in love.

“It’s the horn I’ve been looking for all along,” he told me. “And it feels so familiar.”

We get it, universe. Childlike wonder. Excuse us for growing up and forgetting for a minute. We understand now. We’re on the lookout. Thank you.

---