Karaoke & Tourists

Worst Headline Ever, Sorry.

Last night, I made my poor family sing karaoke with me in our living room with the windows wide open.

I am still married. My child did not disown me. I consider this a win.

We’d gone to an art event where everything and everyone was beautiful and then we’d walked back through town where tourists tried to find the perfect place to eat, laughing with each other as they moved down the sidewalks, hand in hand, some of them. To be fair, some of them were definitely not hand in hand. The husband strode far in front of a wife. A little boy actively tugged away from his mum. Someone may have yelled the f-word at their partner because they couldn’t remember where they parked their car.

Some people who live here give tourists a pretty bad rap in this town of 5,000. They only see the family yelling at each other and not the one skipping down the sidewalk. They worry about congestion on the roads and sidewalks. They want this wonderful town to be the same as it’s always been, I guess. But things change. They change all the time. And these people who are visiting? They aren’t the Big Bad. They aren’t a monolith of humanity, zombie-drone-Stepford-Wives walking in one big horde murmuring, “Lobster…lobsters…Kill your way of life…Lobsters….lobsters.”

They’re people, just people.

They’re people who right this second are visiting another town on a large Maine island that hosts a national park that they want to see and breathe in and explore.

That’s hard to remember sometimes.

Here’s the thing: I am afraid of singing karaoke because it requires you to sing in front of others in a place that isn’t a car. It requires you to be seen, voice cracking sharp and flat, hands shaking, forgetting the words.

Karaoke is like life: it’s hard to be perfect.

But it’s also like life because it’s always changing. There is a new song. Someone else goes to the microphone to croon or to battle feedback, to have their palms sweat with nerves or tingle with excitement. Sometimes there will be applause. Sometimes no one will even notice they’re up there, singing away.

Our daughter, Em, starts her new job at the end of August. She moves to a city, far away from this Maine life where we sing karaoke in our living room with just each other because her mom is too scared to go out and sing in front of people. She’s not super psyched about this job because of the location, which is Washington, DC.

Washington, DC is not Bar Harbor, Maine. It’s a big change.

Last night, we sang karaoke. Shaun said he was getting hoarse. Em said, “this one is my swan song,” about fourteen times before we finally stopped to go to bed.

But I didn’t want to go to bed. I wanted to sing and laugh until I couldn’t talk for days. I wanted to sing and laugh until someone called in a noise complaint or told the police that someone was being murdered at the greenish house on School Street. I wanted to sing and laugh until I collapsed on the couch, unable to move or speak anymore because I had lived in that moment as fully as possible.

Don’t worry. I was a responsible grown-up and good example and blah, blah, blah.

Here’s the other thing: Change happens. People come and go down our streets and in our homes even. Kids grow up. We grow old. And we can choose to laugh and sing and hug and hold hands until we’re hoarse. We can make up words to songs we don’t know as we journey on in our days that create our lives. Or, you know, we can stride ahead of the people we’re supposed to love, get angry when we can’t find the perfect restaurant or even where we parked the car. We can obsess about singing off key or people seeing us fail. Or we can just live.

I hope I can choose to just live. I hope you can, too.

It's our journey, right? But how we face it? How we travel through it? That’s what matters.