When COVID wall came tumbling down, family karaoke still was there
It wasn’t exactly the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Still, it was historic, the day the kids tore down the thick plastic sheeting that for almost a year separated the upstairs from the downstairs, and them from me.
“Down with the wall! Down with the wall!” the three vaccinated millennials chanted as they also ripped off their masks and held them by the strings like dead rats.
I took pictures and tried to feel celebratory. But to say my emotions are kind of flat is like saying COVID is kind of deadly.
When my son ran over and hugged me for the first time since July 2020, I didn’t even cry.
I mean, now what? To paraphrase Dustin Hoffman’s torturers in the suspense-thriller “Marathon Man”: “Is it really safe?”
The vaccines coursing through our immune systems, which constitute the reason we can take down the wall, are a “scientific
triumph,” my sciencejournalism friend tells me.
Meanwhile, we know they’re not 100% effective. They’re also not permanent fixes; COVID guru Dr. Anthony Fauci says they’ll keep us from having a serious response to COVID for “at least” six months. What happens after that? Unprotected now by the safety net of 24/7 masks, there are new concerns: Will the kids
become cavalier and forget to mask-up in certain situations? Is anybody really clear what those situations are? I’m immune-compromised. Did my shot even “take”?
All these thoughts sat atop my frazzled neural pathways the day the wall came down, not so much swirling like when I’m trying to meditate, more like rotting, like other COVID scenarios for
months.
But then somebody remembered to remind me:
“Don’t forget we can karaoke again now, Mom.”
There it was.
My cause de celebre. My reason for living. My bohemian rhapsody. Karaoke was indeed the saving grace in the first months of COVID last year when two of my sons and I were in a bubble. Every Friday night, we not only forgot our COVID woes, we forgot that we were a baby boomer mom and two millennial children trying to co-exist in tight quarters. For a couple of hours each week, we leveled the playing field, them with their signature Hozier and Kendrick Lamar, me with my Whitney Houston and Carly Simon, all of us calling up family standards, Don McLean’s “American Pie,” Arlo Guthrie’s “The City of New Orleans,” anything Beatles, Avett Brothers, Stevie Wonder and Simon and Garfunkel.
This was our collective thing to look forward to – some weeks, it seems, our only thing.
But then come midsummer, we’d had to abandon the microphone.
The youngest moved to Colorado with a new job, and the eldest decided he needed more freedom of movement – and fun – than his ancient mom’s health and talking points would permit. We put up the wall and even a hot plate and a mini-fridge upstairs. And we quit cooking, eating and worst of all, singing together, as life settled into very separate lives, he upstairs with his new dog and his new girlfriend, who eventually moved in, as did my daughter, me downstairs with my virtual therapy visits and mindfulness coloring books.
The separation between us clinched not only the feelings of isolation, but the generation gap, which became more like an abyss, thanks to COVID. I could hear the three of them up there rucking it up together while I meditated and watched “Mary Tyler Moore” on YouTube alone. About the only time we got together was when we occasionally ended up in the front yard watching Rosie go potty.
And so now, the wall is down. And while they’re still up there doing their millennial thing, including holding down demanding, remote jobs, and I’m still down here watching Mary fuss with Lou, Chris Hook, who does a great impression of lounge lizard Bill Murray, is back as Friday night emcee.
And while questions do indeed remain about what constitutes safe and what doesn’t, in the living room on Friday nights at least, all masks are decidedly off.
They say fear and love can’t co-exist. Same with fear and karaoke.
It’s only rock ‘n’ roll, but we like it.