I’m glad we bought season tickets. As anyone living on the East Coast knows it has been something of a harsh winter, perhaps overall the harshest I can remember. Apart from having a few friends over to watch the Patriots win the Super Bowl my wife and I had spent every weekend since mid January mostly puttering around the house alone.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my house. I almost never feel that I need to leave it. I leave work as quickly as I can to get back to it, and then I don’t leave it until I have to again the next morning. Normally though, on vacation days or weekends I enjoy taking full advantage of my neighborhood. As I have said many times, mine is a neighborhood which rewards thoughtful usage. I can’t do everything all the time like a Manhattanite or an Los Angelino, but if I know what I’d like to do I can probably find a time and place when and where I can do it.
Most winters the nasty weather and the icy sidewalks are limited to few enough days that avoiding them amounts to having the pleasure of a few extra days cocooning, this winter however cocooning had become hibernation and it had begun to wear a bit. Until last Saturday. Last Saturday was not any better than any other day in this winter of discontent. It was cold and windy and snow was predicted to start falling in the afternoon. Again. But we had season tickets to the symphony. The music was a mixture of Spanish and Italian and including a guitar soloist and a performance of the sublime “Concierto de Aranjuez”.
Sunk costs are sunk as they say, and not going to the symphony would not have offended anyone in particular. We could have just as easily not gone. Instead, with the impulse provided by already having the tickets, we trudged out the door and down to a new local restaurant. We had an excellent meal and then perambulated through the snow toward Symphony Hall. After the concert we cut through Court Square, mixed with the Falcons fans just leaving the MassMutual Center, wandered up State Street, and headed home all the while watching the snow continue to fall all around us. Again. But we were no longer trapped by it, no longer frozen by the idea of venturing out on a snowy evening as it were.
Having released ourselves from the psychological hold of a foul winter it was inevitable that this weekend too we would venture out. Last night: Theodore’s, The Student Prince, and “Dearly Departed” at CityStage. Next week, who knows? Spring may not be here quite yet, but winter weather no longer has us trapped in the house.
