Karelian Folk Music Ensemble's Rendition Of Lannen Lokari

I love folk music from around the world

During the peak of the Covid terror, 2020, I was very isolated in a small garage apartment in Northwestern CT. My father had recently died, my stepmother was in a nursing home; I was no longer was a caretaker. When you have people who need you, every day, you’re protected from certain chambers of your own psyche and memories.

Well.

I was free to “live my life,” except for the fact that my government had commanded nobody move, breathe, speak, or aspire. The only command was to wait, worshipfully, for the “vaccine.”

When I took my 89 year old landlady to get her shot (I did my best to, within propriety, dissuade her, but she watched MSNBC 24/7 so it was impossible.) Anyway, this is worth noting. I took her in to the hospital, and sat in the hall during the waiting period. Not one, not two, but three women, all with snow-white, short cut hair, jaunty WASPS (is it ok to say that?) in their late 80s, came out of that room with fists upheld, calling out: “Free at last!” They were jubilant. And it was one of the only times I heard anybody express any emotion up there in Sharon, Connecticut. Generally, it was a soundless place.

I don’t want to mock them at all, I felt sympathy for how they felt.

Like us, they were seeking to be free again.

I felt my heart sink. But I smiled politely and after the 15 minute waiting period, brought her home.

My landlady’s problems had just begun: Dizziness, lung clots, all kinds of things. We made several hospital and doctor visits and I believed I was practicing neighborly decency.

Her personality changed. Eventually, she became downright mean. I will spare you the details. But I do think these shots make people mean. I never even got my deposit back. And when I emailed to tell her with idiotic cheerfulness how I was making the place sparkling clean and had hired a guy to repaint and buff over some Jack and Lewis scratches she correctively scolded me thus: “It was sparkling clean before you moved in.”

Ouch.

Also:

Why?

Also: For this I exposed myself to spike proteins inside my car potentially over and over?

In any case, one way I calmed myself down during that frightful, lonely year in Sharon, Connecticut, was to listen to one of my favorite songs from one of my favorite bands. The band is Karelian Folk Music Ensemble. And the song is an old Finnish immigrant song called Lannen Lokari. I don’t know what it is about these rhythms, or this melody, that took me out of trauma and into hope every time, but it did.

They’re singing in Finnish— not Karelian. It’s a song about being in a foreign land, longing for home.