TREE FROGS AND KARAOKE
A memento mori is anything that keeps you mindful of life’s only absolute: that it ends. Here’s my equivalent of the human skull kept by a medieval philosopher on his desk. It dates from the time my wife and I stopped being working adults in Michigan, and became golfing geriatrics in Naples, Florida.
When the rainy season starts in Naples, tree frogs take back the night. Where they go and what they do the rest of the time I have no idea. But once the rain starts, the return of tree frogs means we can forget about conversation during Happy Hour.
Ignorant of this when we first moved here, we spent our first night outside. We sat under the covered part of our nice, new screened pool deck, watching as a tropical rainstorm battered our swimming pool. It was dramatic and powerful, like the end of the world. Or, for us, the beginning of a new one. Replete with lightning bolts followed by thunder that shook our chairs, the storm convinced us we had come to the right, exotic place to retire.
It was still raining when we went to bed. The powerful downpour drummed us to sleep, but sometime around two, we both woke. Something was wrong. We heard no thunder, or gurgling in the gutters. The air conditioning was still pumping away.
But some major piece of technology in our new house seemed already to have failed. The whole place was vibrating to a loud WOW WOW. It was as though the washing machine and the garbage disposal had turned themselves on, then shaken loose from their mounts.
In the dark, I could see my wife’s lips moving. “WHAT?”
“I SAID WE BOUGHT A LEMON!”
“DON’T WORRY, OUR HOMEOWNER’S POLICY IS ALREADY IN
EFFECT!” I was trying to reassure myself, not my wife. “WE ALSO HAVE TOTAL CRADLE-TO-THE-GRAVE HOME MAINTENANCE COVERAGE!”
“DO YOU THINK IT’S COMING FROM OUTSIDE?”
We got up, went into the living room and pulled open the glass door wall. Yes, it was. A million things born from the mind of Stephen King were eagerly waiting for us to step out into the night.
“Mosquitoes?”
“Frogs,” my wife said.
She was right. We turned on the lights, and saw a dozen or more swimming in the now placid pool, frogs no bigger than gummy bears. But in the millions, they formed a throbbing chorus that numbed our brains. As we stood in our underwear, I now saw other, floating frogs. Frogs that had croaked their last.
That same week, we went to our first karaoke night at the clubhouse.
Beginning at four in the afternoon on Wednesdays, a parade of senior men and women are compelled by some inner force to get up over and over again in our club’s dining room. Accompanied by synthesizer music, they more or less sing. This is accomplished under the guidance of a young woman who operates the karaoke machine.
The young woman can’t sing either, which is a good thing, and probably explains why she has kept her job. No one wants the jarring effect of someone who can sing causing everyone who’s eating or at the bar to suddenly realize how awful what’s been going on actually is.
Among the regular singers are several specialists.
That first Wednesday, and every Wednesday since, when a Sinatra tune begins its Nelson Riddle opening bars, a thin, white-haired gentleman in an aloha shirt takes the stage. The only Sinatra aspect of this man’s efforts are his attempts at the higher register moments for which Sinatra is famous.
The white-haired gentleman lives for these moments. Or would if he could find them. But only his head thrown back and his arms jerking down for emphasis reveal that’s where we are in the song.
This is because his voice is dominated by a vibrato so extreme as to waiver off the oscilloscope. But no matter. At this late stage of life he has come to terms. He has arrived at a point of either willed ignorance or acceptance that frees him to sing every Wednesday, until his engagement ends here on earth.
Two other specialists figure as well. The first concentrates on the work of another high-drama artist, Barbara Streisand. The woman is plump and tall, with yellow hair, and a commitment to tangerine blusher. She can be counted on to take the mic and bob and weave her way through “People” or “The Way We Were.” She also owns “Feelings,” which I don’t think is a Babs tune, but should be.
Along with the blusher, this lady favors Lilly Pulitzer ensembles that highlight her makeup and hair. In some ways, she is the best of the lot on Wednesdays, and I think it’s because she has retained some self-consciousness. This keeps her mindful of the vast distance separating the voice she emulates from her own. The result is a volume level that never intrudes on talk of golf, football, or recent surgeries and deaths.
The third specialist has no such restraint.
Like the white-haired gentleman, this fellow has unstuck himself from any inhibitions he might once have had. But unlike his karaoke colleague, he has no vibrato. His voice is as flat as Iowa, and this fits with his commitment to folk tunes we all learned as children.
By “all,” I mean all of us old white people here on the golf course, not “all” in places like Motown or Memphis. There, I suppose children of our generation grew up with Billy Holiday and Otis Redding. With us, it was “Red River Valley, “I’ve been Working on the Railroad,” “Old McDonald Had a Farm,” and so on.
This third regular has a brush cut. He is stocky, with a solid jaw, and always wears short-sleeved white dress shirts that make me think he was once an engineer. Whatever he was, the folk songs of childhood still resonate for him. When the kindly young woman gives him the signal, he marches up the riser, takes the mic, and straightens his broad shoulders.
At least the first time or two, it’s something to see: a retired engineer who has said goodbye to calculus, the laws of physics and software, and now sings karaoke. He doesn’t stretch his neck, or jerk his hands down like the white-haired fellow. He oscillates his body from the waist up, to keep time.
And since he is both tone deaf and devoid of rhythm, watching him metronome this way is what the viewer focuses on. The lyrics are there — Oh Clementine, my Clementine, whatever — but the voice is taking the words on aimless flights. And with his body oscillating to one tempo as the synthesizer presents something else…
Even so, to the man’s credit, a time always comes when awareness dawns. If you are experienced, you see it getting ready to happen. As I’ve said, the man is solidly built and muscular, with a brush cut. The general effect of his appearance is one of brutal efficiency. This means the dawning moment is somber, not theatrical. But there it is: all at once he understands that whatever he’s singing is progressing at radical odds with whatever is being played on the karaoke machine.
But — again to his credit — he doesn’t stop and run away (what I would do, if life and thoughts of mortality led me to perform on karaoke night). Instead, he races tonelessly through the chorus in progress, then sits down as the recording wends its way to a leisurely conclusion.
Are you waiting for a lesson in all this? Some memento mori point on which to reflect? My apologies, there isn’t one. All karaoke night means is that the song’s playlist ends the same for a million tree frogs as it does for us. This being the case (and it most definitely is), there really is no reason not to get up and make a fool of yourself on Wednesday. If that’s what you want to do.
