Pandemic Elf: Holiday music

Hello, I am the Pandemic Elf. I am your trail guide through the Holiday Path winding through the Pandemic Forest. My job is to point out detours, sinkholes, and other dangers so they don't catch you unawares.

First up: MUSIC!

So I was hurtling down TX-130 (literally - the speed is 80, and judging by the vehicles around me, that's a minimum speed) to meet my best friend, the BFF-DRE, in La Grange, which is more or less the middle point between her house in Houston and mine in Austin. I turned on a Spotify playlist of songs from Firestone Christmas albums which some dear soul compiled to kind of jump-start my holiday spirit.

Oh my.

Oh my my my.

This is not 2019. Things are different this year.

As each song came on, I couldn't help but talk back to them, and rather sardonically:

♪ It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year!
Yeah, dude, but this is 2020. Pretty low bar.

♪ Here We Come a Caroling ...
Ack! You're not wearing a mask! And singing in one of the biggest ways to spread covid! (slams door)

♪ City sidewalks, busy sidewalks ...
Nope. No, they're not. And if they are, they shouldn't be. Call your governor and demand lockdown.

♪ ...And when you walk down the street, say hello to friends you know, and everyone you meet.

I can't recognize anyone I know under these masks. And saying hello = potential transmission.

♪ I'll be home for Christmas, you can plan on me.

(Bursts into tears.)

So, forewarned is forearmed. When listening to the classic songs of yore (yore=every year before 2020), you have three choices:

1) Laugh out loud and mock those lyrics which SO do not work in this time of Pandemic;

2) Ignore the pandemic, and be transported to pre- or post-covid world;

3) Cry.

Frankly, all the choices are good ones. I intend on a carefully orchestrated combination, depending on the song and what I'm feeling in any given moment.

Interesting note to my religious liberal friends. You know who you are. The ones reading ahead in the hymnal to see if you agree with the next line, ready to quibble over word choices:

The songs that still work this year are actually the religious ones. Silent Night and Hark the Herald Angels Sing and O Little Town of Bethlehem. So listen away. Use your universal translator and translate Jesus or Baby or King into something that gives you hope, maybe Dr. Fauci or Stacey Abrams or Ron Klain or Cyrus Vance.

Let every heart prepare him room.

Or just enjoy the metaphor of a baby being born into a scary, unjust world who would grow up to talk about peace and healing people and loving your neighbor and overthrowing corrupt systems.

Comments

We've Reached the "Tom Hanks Eating Raw Fish" Phase of the Pandemic

Last May, as it became apparent the covid-19 pandemic was not going to be a temporary affair, I wrote about the benefits of imagining you were shipwrecked on a deserted island. Now, a year after we began hearing about the "novel coronovirus," I suspect that many of us have now entered the "Tom Hanks Eating Raw Fish" stage of the pandemic. We've made the best of things. Rearranged home offices and homeschool desks. Got through the holidays, mustering as much joy as we could. There's a permanent hook or basket at the front door for our masks. Most of us by now either know someone who died of covid, or are, at most, 2 degrees away. Our co-worker's husband's mother. Our friend's aunt. Or closer. We've grieved. And now...we're just numb. We keep putting one foot in front of the other, because that's what we have to do. We eat, we drink, we sleep. We get our work done. We nag our kids to do school work. But our affect is flat. Like Ha...

"I Don't Know Who I Am Now" or The Importance of Not Assuming for a While

The next 5 months are probably going to be kinda weird. Uncertainty and anxiety flying all over the place. Duck! And then after that ... it's also going to be kinda weird, but a different kind of weird, as we move into the After Times, and figure out what exactly they're going to be like, and what exactly WE are going to be like. It is in times like these, that I like to turn to art to help make sense of it all. I refer, of course, to the art known as the television series Doctor Who. I mean, if we know things are going to be weird, we probably should look at some art that deals with the weird, right? Now's the time to examine Hieronymous Bosch and Marc Chagall. And Doctor Who, that time-traveling, face-shifting hero. Part of the Doctor Who story (and why it's been able to keep going so long) is that rather than die, the Doctor regenerates, retaining who they are, but with a different face, body, and to a certain extent, a different personality. Immediately afte...

Beloved Community: The Now and Not Yet

Rev. Christine Robinson has a great little post up about the phrase "beloved community" and why it's problematic to use that to describe a church. Like her mom, I can get cranky about the whole thing, but my crankiness lies in the misuse of what is, to me, such a breathtaking and profound concept. Martin Luther King, Jr., someone whose words I study in great detail, is the one we often think of as originating the term, but he learned about it through the writings of Josiah Royce. Josiah Royce (right) with close friend William James. Royce was a philosopher, studying Kant, Hegel. I imagine he would have enjoyed Koestler's theory of the holon , because he saw humanity as being both individuals and part of a greater "organism" that was community. As King's belief about Beloved Community would be rooted in agape , Royce's philosophy stemmed from what he called loyalty, and by that he meant, "the practically devoted love of an individual f...

Boots and Blessings

Search This Blog