I’m sure you’ve felt it as I have — that feeling that maybe, just maybe, we can begin to breathe again.
Sure, it has something to do with ripping off that smothering facemask, but it has to do with way more than that. It has to do with watching more and more of our friends, family and neighbors get life-saving vaccines, and then boosters. It has to do with watching covid infections, hospitalizations and death rate rates plummet as a result.
And most of all, it has to do with turning off the daily poison of TV and social media, going out to a dinner, a party or a family gathering, and remembering what a real face-to-face smile looks and feels like.
That’s the way I felt when I went to a Halloween party in Sun City in late October. Pretty much everybody walked in wearing a Covid mask, because that’s what the sign on the door asked us to do. But by the time the Beaux Band rolled into their first Chicago song, off came the facemasks and on went the dancing shoes.
And on went the smiles, too — at least the ones you could see that weren’t hidden behind a rubber mask of some other sort.
Less than two weeks before, I had attended a concert in the same room, and it was a different story. That time, everybody wore facemasks throughout the two-hour concert, as requested by the organizers. And pretty much everybody was hot, stuffy and uncomfortable doing so.
The difference between the events, as far as I can tell, was timing. In early October, booster shots had just become available for some of the attendees who had already been vaccinated months before, but only for those who had received the Johnson and Johnson vaccine more than six months prior. The CDC was still waffling on other vaccine boosters.
But by the time of the Halloween party, other boosters were approved and pretty much everybody was eligible for them, even if they crossed over from one vaccine to another. And a good majority of those attending that party — at least by informal poll — had been boosted by then.
And so, at long last, it felt as if we could breathe again. And smile again. And turn off the angry gloom-and-doom dividing poison of TV and Facebook and politics and go back to the real world, back to things we can all agree on. Things like the Halloween fun that lets us all be carefree kids again.
At long last, we could all leave our tribes behind and smile at every friendly, fun-loving face we saw, all 200 or so of them.
Well, at least all but one of those at the Halloween party could do that.
One man wore a roll of toilet paper around his neck, and when he was handed a microphone and asked what his costume stood for, he said into the mic: “I’m Joe Biden, and I’m an A** hole.”
There was a collective gasp in the room, a nervous laugh — maybe even an appreciative laugh here and there — but to the credit of virtually everyone else in the room, nobody took the bait. Nobody cheered. Nobody yelled out a curse. Nobody chanted mindless slogans.
Statistically, if attendees at that party were representative of the Sun City community as a whole, I’m guessing that most were conservatives with no love for our current president. And yet, to their credit, they didn’t take the bait.
And neither did those of the opposite persuasion. Oh, some rolled their eyes, groaned or shook their heads. But nobody took the bait and shouted out some opposing view.
The toilet-paper guy was probably looking for more of a reaction, like a 12-year-old who walks into a roomful of adults, farts loudly, and waits for someone to say, “Oh, isn’t he cute and clever?”
Twelve-year-olds do things like that because they can’t read the faces of adults who are embarrassed for the kid, who lacks the maturity to be embarrassed for himself.
But, to the credit of virtually everybody else at the party, nobody took the bait one way or the other. For them, it felt too good to get out of the house, away from the angry gloom-and-doom dividing poison of TV and Facebook and politics and be back in the real world to remember what a real face-to-face smile looks and feels like, without worrying whether the person you’re sharing smiles with might agree or disagree with you on some other thing that has no place at a festive party.
For them at least, it felt good to leave that poison bait behind and to breathe again.
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com.
