Merry Christmas! Wait, What Year is This?

Mom and I were outside working in the garden. She stopped to look at me.

"Did something poop on my head?"

"I don't know, Mom. There was nothing in the forecast about scattered poop."

Mom felt at her hair and looked up at the trees. "Let's go back in."

"Right. We're not wanted out here."

We were going to Toots' Virtual Graduation. Last weekend she'd had her Virtual Prom where I hoped she didn't get a virtual STD, a remark Mom failed to find funny. Bingo was not amused, either.

"Bingo! Be good!"

Bingo rushed at me with jaws slavering, missing my balls by a ball hair.

"Bad!" Mom clapped her hands.

She gave Bingo a flash-fried buffalo, which settled him for a brief moment. In that space of breathing, Mom turned to Alexa.

"Alexa! Play Devo."

Whip It started to play.

"You like Devo, don't you?"

"Yes. In fact, one time Andy saw them in concert and his ears exploded right off his head. He's a very interesting person, and that really happened to him. By the way, Mom, you know the lyrics are about masturbation?"

Mom stared aghast at the scrolling lyrics. "Alexa!" Mom yelled. "Bad!"

Bingo spit out his buffalo carcass and looked up, confused.

"Not you, Bing. Let's go."

We went out to the car. As we drove to my brother's house I explained how I was learning to stop worrying and love the pandemic.

"I've put tape on the floor of my bathtub. In case there's a second person in my shower they'll have to stand six feet away from me. Also I've put tape by the toilet so my feet are six feet away from each other while I do my business."

"Where is my lipstick? Where is my lipstick?"

"I got the idea from the library, you know. When I went to work the other day there was tape on the floors everywhere so we'd know to stay far apart from each other. Call it Zani Zones, if you will. Todd didn't like it, though. Sometimes he'd stand right on the border when he talked to me. That's his punk rock ethos coming through."

"Here it is."

"Less punk rock is his cyber tidiness. I found out that he deletes everything in his trash right away. Now if he can just find a way to compost his emails."

"Oh, look, Toots is crying." Mom was looking at her phone. "I wonder why she's crying?"

I looked at her phone. There was a picture of my brother and an emoticon

"Mom, they're laughing, not crying."

"Oh, I only saw the tears."

"'I only saw the tears,'" I said musingly. "That's the perfect epitaph for you, Mom. Or it's a good name for some emo-goth band, like maybe a Robert Smith side project."

"Er, maybe not."

We arrived, and after hugs and smearing saliva on each other, we hunkered before the laptop to watch the spectacle of graduation but without all that graduation in it.

"This is great," I said. "We don't have to sit in an auditorium and pretend to care. Now we can sit here and pretend to care. We're skipping the principal's speech, right? Is it still Harold R. Scott?"

Infinite Platitudes was the theme of the ceremony. Together we stood strong and felt ready to face the challenges of the future, together.

At one point I almost tripped on my beard.

"That beard makes you look old," Mom said with quiet disappointment.

"You're right, Mom. But that gives me an idea." 

"What are you doing?"

I was applying strips of tape to my beard so the hairs could stay socially distant. I turned on Mom, my beard taped wildly, my eyes crazed, my mouth spitting. "How do you like me now, huh? HOW DO YOU LIKE ME NOW."

"You need help."

CONGRADULATIONS, TOOTS!!

(Sure sure sure)