Let's Talk About Timing
In John Lennon's song "Beautiful Boy," there is a famous line: "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." Plans that get interrupted by the timing of events outside your control. As I write this, on April 14, 2020, pretty much everyone I know has had life happen to them while they were making other plans. Even a trip to the store has changed significantly. But what about the people who were planning a wedding, or a week away from a trip overseas? Or worse, the people who've contracted the virus. Plans -- and lives -- upended by the timing of events outside their control.
A while back, timing played a significant role in my life around a milestone event. I was thrown a big surprise party for my birthday at Hilltop Steak House in Saugus. It had been my dad‘s favorite restaurant, which made the event even more special. My wife surprised me with tickets to The Producers on Broadway. I received calls from a number of friends who couldn’t make the party, including some close friends in New York City who had helped my wife get the tickets. My wife apologized for being unable to get tickets for my actual birthday. Instead, they were for about six weeks later. This was a good thing, as it turned out. You see, this particular birthday was on September 10, 2001.
Six weeks later, we’re staying at an incredibly funky, Art Deco hotel right in Times Square. I’m there with a couple of my friends, as my wife had planned this as for me as a buddy road trip. Although I’d been to the city many times, the vibe was quite different this time. People were incredibly nice to each other. Other than that, if you were in Midtown you would never know anything had happened to the city.
We had a wonderful time seeing a couple fantastic Broadway shows and spending a ridiculously small amount of money, as hotels discounted you $100 for each show ticket stub you presented.
Of course, we had to travel to the site of the towers. Lower Manhattan was incredibly... quiet. The difference, coming from midtown, was striking. Well before reaching the perimeter, we could see the jagged spikes of the ruined buildings reaching up like claws.
And the smell. When I was doing theater in college, he had a student who had worked in Boston shipyards for a couple of years before coming to college to study theater. He taught us all how to weld, which let us build some pretty interesting sets. If you’ve ever welded, you know it has a unique smell. The smell of burning steel. That’s the smell I remember from that day in lower Manhattan.
We paid our respects, and then returned to our hotel.
It was sobering to reflect on the fact that I had been in the trade center tower only months before. The startup my wife worked for had its headquarters in New York, and for the Christmas party, they had a cruise around the harbor and a big party. We stayed at the Marriott World Trade Center, one of the buildings destroyed in the attacks. We partied in the restaurant at the top of the tower. I remember that cavernous, ornate lobby, and how long it took the elevator to get to the top floor. That was early January 2001. Now, almost twenty years later, I find myself thinking about NYC, that extraordinary city, and wishing people there -- and everywhere else -- stay safe and healthy.
Timing is everything. The day you get tickets to the show. The weekend your company plans a party. These days it may be the person standing behind you in a line, or the hand that grabbed the staircase railing just before you did.
Timing is everything, they say.
Indeed it is.
