How to Prepare for the Unexpected

These two things happened in December 1999, a year when it felt like the world as we knew it was about to end. Thing one was the Y2K scare: Computers would short-circuit, planes might fall out of the sky, bank accounts could be erased, and my mom wasn’t taking any chances. Like many people, she started prepping, filling the basement shelves with bottled water, canned soup and jumbo-sized jars of peanut butter. “It was just because we were renovating the kitchen!” she’d say years later, when the millennium had quietly come and gone. Being prepared hadn’t prevented a disaster, but it did leave us with years of baked beans and cream of mushroom soup.

Thing two actually happened before thing one as things sometimes do. Every year at my elementary school there was a winter pageant run by the music teacher, who I’ll call Mr. T. And like the real Mr. T, our Mr. T was eccentric, a towering presence, probably seven feet tall, with a mustache so thick it was more like a sidekick or small pet. The kind of mustache that has matching luggage and strong opinions about the best bourbon. The mustache and Mr. T were all business, and they brought a Broadway-level flair to the pageant. As third-graders, we were expected to sing “Seasons of Love” like we were auditioning for Rent, and Mr. T. fancied himself a conductor at the Met, volatile temper included. Once while practicing with drumsticks, a boy in my class, the hyperactive kind, got restless. I’m not sure if the kid even got a warning before Mr. T.’s mustache bristled and he screamed, “Knock it off right now!” while jabbing his baton in the air like a lance. It was harsh, and we all got the message. There was no tolerance for messing up, especially at the winter pageant.

If you’re feeling the tension, just brace yourself because you don’t even know what’s coming. My class wasn’t just performing a song; we were performing a song that would go down in history. The school faculty had decided to deal with the impending end of the world by creating a time capsule. Each class would add something so that people in the future would know what it had been like to live in the 20th century. I’m not sure what the other classes added – maybe tamagotchis or beanie babies or those really cute Hello Kitty mechanical pencils that the teachers overcharged us for in the school store. I’d hoped we would contribute something cool, but instead, my teacher said we’d add a video of our pageant performance to the time capsule. A video? I thought that sounded so boring, having no idea what was about to happen next.

On the morning of the pageant, the auditorium was decorated with white icicle lights and big paper snowflakes. It smelled like glue and coffee as parents, the kind who could come to a recital during the school day, crammed into rows. My parents weren’t there; they had to work, but it was still exciting. We smiled on the risers, as we’d been coached, even though we couldn’t see the crowd’s faces in the darkness. Then Mr. T. stood with baton in hand, and the music began.

We started singing about measuring time in daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee. And I tried not to do that thing I always do when I hear this song, when I think there’s no way there’s only 525,600 minutes in a year. That’s not enough! Time was moving fast – just a year ago, I’d been seven, and soon I would be nine, then ten! What dangers awaited once I hit double digits? I struggled to stay present, until I felt something wet on my shoulder. Something brown and slick. Oh no, I thought, the ceiling is leaking. Sometimes that happened in school, and the teachers would try to downplay it, but it was one of those interruptions to the normal flow of things that threw off the entire day. Like when it would snow, even a little bit, and it became impossible to concentrate on multiplication tables or learning the cursive H.

Anyway I thought the ceiling was leaking, but then I felt something warm on the back of my neck. We weren’t even halfway through the song, but I had to turn around, and when I did, the girl behind me on the risers threw up all over my head.

Everyone knew, but my class had been so drilled in the show-must-go-on mantra that no one dared to move or stop singing. No one, I guess, except me. From my spot on the risers, I fought gridlock and bailed on the show.

I knew I wasn’t supposed to do this, but it was an emergency! And at that moment, it also seemed like a good idea to approach Mr. T, who was still conducting my class. I thought, until embarrassingly recently, that he wasn’t acknowledging me because he was too tall to see, but of course, that wasn’t it. No amount of preparation had prepared him for what just happened – but still, the show had to go on.

So I took myself down to the nurse’s office. “You threw up?” They ushered me to a soft cot, but once I told them someone else threw up on me, I got relegated to a stiff chair, where I waited as other kids, sick kids, got band aids and temperature checks. When it was finally my turn, all they did was give me an XXL yellow t-shirt to change into. Then I went back to class where there were whispers that the girl who threw up had eaten tomatoes for breakfast. Tomatoes. Even the hyperactive kid didn’t want to sit near me. “You smell,” he said, dragging his desk away.

I asked the teacher if we’d have to re-do the video. “Of course not,” she said, talking more to the teacher’s aide. “We’re going to make people think everyone in 1999 threw up on each other.” Then she and the aide laughed in that hyena way adults do when they’re making fun of kids. I went back to my desk and spent the rest of the day in someone else’s puke. When I got home, no one made a big deal about it. I don’t even think I took a bath right away. And when I did wash my hair, I watched the water turn yellowish-brown. I’d been waiting all day for someone else to clean up the mess, but the adults and their mustaches had no clue how to be helpful in a crisis, however small. Some messes, I learned, would belong to me, even when they weren’t my fault.

This wasn’t some great trauma of my life, but it’s a lesson I keep revisiting. Life is messy, and no matter how much you prepare or rehearse, things rarely turn out the way you expect. You plan a party and someone spills wine on your couch. You go on a restorative vacation and end up crying the moment you get to the rental house. For years, I thought messes were something to be cleaned up or at least hidden, but I’ve learned that not every mess needs to be fixed. Some messes, even the big ones that aren’t cute pageant stories, are meant to sit awhile, like dishes in the sink. Sometimes the real work is just letting them be.

A few years ago, my mom told me that the janitor at my old elementary school had found the time capsule we made in 1999 – the one with a video of my class.

“Do you want to see it?” she asked.

I was curious, but then I thought about it. I didn’t want to bring my adult self into that time capsule – the one that likes to write endings and make sense of things. I’d never seen the video, and I realized I didn’t need to. I kind of like the idea that there’s a box, somewhere in the world, with a video of me getting barfed on during a third-grade pageant. It was always supposed to be that way, something for a stranger to discover. And maybe they’ll laugh or cringe. Maybe they’ll just be grateful to have stumbled onto someone else’s mess. I’m not in a rush to clean it up, but who knows, maybe I’ll watch it someday. I’m trying to be more prepared for the unexpected.