Shawn Vestal: A year haunted by all that we did not do – The Spokesman-Review

Talk about cancel culture.

Our calendar of events was cleared completely byCOVID.

Bloomsday. Get Lit! The Friends of Manito Plant Sale.

The Spokane Bike Swap and Expo. The YWCAs Spring Fling fund-raiser.

The Shadle Park Spring Craft Show. The Spokane Speed and Custom Show.

From our largest traditions to our smallest gatherings canceled. Its been a year haunted by the not-done, the rain check, the unperformed.

A year without festivals without Hoopfest and ArtFest and Musicfest Northwest and the Coeur dAlene Blues Festival and the Spokane Blues Festival.

A year without concerts without Cher or Allen Stone or Sleater-Kinney or Ronnie Milsap or The Flaming Lips or Wilco.

A year without dinner and a show. Without movies out or theater. Without The Book of Mormon or Jersey Boys at the First Interstate Center. Without Matilda at the Lake City Playhouse or Cabaret at the Civic Theatre.

Canceled. The things we do every year undone. The special events we planned for unscheduled. All the connections we make with our people unconnected. At best, we Zoomed.

A lost year.

It started a little more than 12 months ago, as it was becoming more and more obvious that the pandemic was big trouble. The governor would not issue his stay-home order until March 23, but the cancellations and postponements were already piling up.

Looking back, it is striking how many organizations announced that they were merely postponing things, rescheduling events for a few months down the road. Before long, it became pointless to keep track of what was canceled and what was not.

Everything was.

The big, broad effects of those cancellations have gotten the lions share of the attention, naturally schools shut down, restaurants shuttered, workplaces emptied. The major losses to life and well-being have been the rightful focus.

But theres been a massive loss in cultural, community events, too.

Almost all of the gatherings that signal our seasons and rescue us from solitude gone. Graduations. Potlucks. Proms. Weddings. Funerals in the darkest of ironies, in a year of such loss, even our ways of grieving together have been lost.

Chess club and Math is Cool and volleyball. Poetry readings and car shows. Fairgrounds and libraries. Gyms and senior centers. Climbing walls and rec-league sports and drinks out with co-workers.

Hooptown lost its hoops. The NCAA tournament was canceled, and with it Spokanes round of games. Hoopfest was postponed, then canceled. As the pandemic dragged on, a particular cruelty was visited on Spokane basketball fans, as the undefeated Zags the apotheosis of a decadeslong development of a basketball dynasty composed their perfect season before cardboard fans, in echoing gymnasiums.

The sacrifices were necessary, of course. The greater losses, to life and well-being, compelled them, and still do. And yet these past 12 months have been so strange, so divorced from the communitys cycle of life, that it has left us starved for culture and connection.

Will we get that back soon? Stand shoulder-to-shoulder at a Wilco concert, crowd into the Cracker Building for Terrain, see Cats again, swarm around the gleaming engines at a car show or see our neighbors at a flower sale or bingo game? Stay out too late at a bar, pack a table a little too full at a restaurant? Hear the roar at the McCarthey Center or Reese Court or Union Stadium?

Of course we will. Were getting there now, though it could not possibly come fast enough. The calendar will fill, and our points of connection and culture and community will return.

Well arrive there, in that life of the uncanceled calendar, on the other side of this lost year, as though we are landing on a lovely new shore. A place we know well, seen as if for the first time, with fonder hearts and fresh eyes and a raging hunger to be among each other once again.

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Shawn Vestal: A year haunted by all that we did not do - The Spokesman-Review