Garrison Keillor's Blog

Skip the patty-cake, poke ’em in the snoot

It’s good to see Zohran Mamdani meeting with New Yorkers who opposed him in his run for mayor, including a closed-door meeting with a bunch of rank-and-file cops. Earlier in his career Mr. Mamdani uttered the words “defund” and “police” close together in one sentence, which is dumb, and he’s not saying it anymore. It’s what you’re supposed to do after you win a primary and become the Democratic candidate, meet with people who disagree and say fewer dumb things.

There are dedicated cops and some not so much but when you need the police you need the police, you don’t need a pollster, a nail polisher, or a politician. My lasting memory of New York cops goes back to when I landed at JFK and headed for the cabstand, heard shouting, saw people waving their hands and a young woman lying on the sidewalk apparently unconscious. A guy in an orange jacket got on his walkie-talkie, and two cops came running, one of them got on the phone and the other one lay down beside the woman and talked to her and put an arm around her.

It’s fine that Mr. Mamdani has gotten East Asians and Africans excited and first-generation Americans and young lefties, this is Diversity City and Complexityville, and millions of people need to move around town every day and live their lives and scrape together a living free from fear, and the mayor’s job is to secure that freedom and be reasonably honest. Palestine is not his assignment. I know young people who took a big chance to come live here and did so because they had a dream. I married one. So Mr. Mamdani is carrying the high hopes of a great many people and I hope he knows that he — being an outsider and a Muslim — will be held to a high standard. The city has known some corrupt mayors who invited pals to partake of the pork but when you call yourself a socialist, it signals that you’re not in it to do favors for your backers. A socialist is in it for the common good.

I’d be okay living in Kansas City but I love New York because my wife does. She comes back from her long walks exhilarated and that makes me happy. She takes me to the Met for Puccini and Strauss and Verdi and I enjoy her pleasure. She is utterly alive here. She reads the Times sitting across the breakfast table, doesn’t spend too much time on the front page, skips the opinion stuff, which is mostly dismay, and jumps to the odd and unique and human stories deep inside and the riveting facts. There is a love of facts in old-fashioned journalism, an odd pleasure in being proved wrong, that is missing in the propaganda press, and a mature grown-up appreciates one and avoids the other.

This is why the guy with the red tie — who is fortunate his father was born before he was — moved to Florida. New Yorkers saw through him a long time ago. He bought Marjorie Merriwether Post’s palace in Palm Beach where people respect narcissism more than Manhattan does and there he made contact with Martian children who elected him leader of the free world for their own amusement and have been loving his wackiness ever since. In New York, he is simply a traffic hazard. Red lights flash, avenues close, people ride the subway and curse him as they pass below. Someday he’ll be honored by the city naming a storm sewer after him, meanwhile he doesn’t really exist except as a warning to children: when you promise to make America great and instead you make it a joke, history will not be kind.

The Democrats’ problem is simple: they loved high school debate, making your point, rebutting the opponent’s, but were flummoxed by Trump, a stream-of-consciousness orator uninhibited by factuality or relevance, uninterested in actual government policy. They were playing tennis and he was a pro wrestler. Biden prepared to debate him by memorizing statistics, then got confused when Trump said that Biden’s administration was the worst in American history. Biden should’ve said, “You are a werewolf and you drink the blood of aborted infants.” Big mistake. Democrats running for Congress next year shouldn’t waste time on economics. Declare that the Prez is a woman in transition and promise to depants him and confiscate the six billion he’s earned since January. End of the story. Election’s over.

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Life goes on, we watch the lampposts passing

I am a hard worker and last week I put in a string of 12-hour shifts bent over a laptop and found it exhilarating even though it’s hard on your legs. You get up and walk into the next room and feel off-balance, so you do a few squats but come right back to your work. Two surgeons repaired my defective heart and gave me a couple bonus decades and I don’t wish to spend this astonishing gift recumbent in Boca Raton sipping rum fizzes. I intend to finish this book and then hike up Columbus Avenue to morning Mass at St. Michael’s.

I was brought up Brethren but I escaped into Episcopalian. Brethren believe that if you study Scripture you will find the truth and graduate into redemption but your grammar needs to be correct and punctuation proper. Anglicans believe it’s a miracle. The candles, the smoke, the Black lady deacon who reads the Gospel in a powerful voice.

We kneel and make our confession
As the Gospel commands,
Are forgiven of our transgressions,
Then we stand and turn around and shake hands.

We sing “Nearer My God to Thee” and I look around and see high-priced lawyers weeping and investment executives, and this old man is moved.

On the way home I shop at Trader Joe’s where the clientele is a fraction of my age and I stand with my cart in a long line at checkout and overhear snatches of buoyant conversation about the ordinary challenge of living in Manhattan, whereas people my age worry about the fate of democracy, economic collapse, environmental holocaust. There are 24 cashiers at Joe’s so the line moves steadily; it’s exciting, with college kids and mothers of tiny children, and I listen to phone conversations about the weekend and boss problems and school issues and a musical someone hears is very good and I never hear the name that rhymes with Dump, the guy who sends masked armed men into the streets in the middle of the night and who all by himself announces 100% tariffs on China. He is quite irrelevant here. Lawlessness in Washington is a problem for the courts, not for the young people in line; they are occupied with living their lives.

I look at the cashiers and wonder which of them are actors, which writers. You can see who the dancers are, they look starved, I worry about them. Maybe they’ve discovered that they have the wrong body for dance: they have thighs and a butt. I was young and eager once, aware of the risks of pursuing an independent life, but it was simply something a young person did. I knew others on the same path, we solidified each other. I knew aspiring songwriters with big ideas who also were able to do home repair and fix a car.

New York is a tolerant place and if you went to Trader Joe’s in your pajamas, people would figure there’s a reason — maybe you’re a brilliant physicist and were puzzling a new theorem and didn’t notice — maybe you’re under indictment and going for the insanity defense. The conspiracy-minded who are children from another galaxy sent to Earth to show that the CIA was responsible for 9/11 and that the Deep State is using vaccines to alter our genetic structure do not do well here. They belong on the Great Plains. But I grieve for my old friend Alison Rose who died this month in her tiny apartment on the East Side, author of a couple of very personal books and a string of funny Talk of the Town pieces in The New Yorker, who chose to isolate herself in the big city. She resisted attempts to help her. She lived her own story and I respect her secrets.

And I come home to my darling who walks five or six miles through the city daily and thrives on the sights and sounds and who stands behind me and puts her hands on my shoulders and with this slight gesture my world is complete. I am launched on a career as an octogenarian stand-up and finishing a book. I cannot be a New Yorker because my mother brought me up not to interrupt when others are talking and not to complain, and if you observe those prohibitions in this city, (1) you will be silent in social situations and (2) people will suspect dementia. But so long as I am loved by a New Yorker, I am a happy man.

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Your civics teacher will speak now

It’s a sunny day in old New York and I’m a happy man even though I’m at an age when friends are falling left and right but what troubles me right now is the death of newspapers and that means the eventual death of the Republic because people are slippery where power is involved and lying is a natural talent. In 1971, an employee of the RAND Corporation, Daniel Ellsberg, gave the Pentagon Papers to the Washington Post where Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein published it, showing that every president from Truman on had lied to the public about what was happening in Vietnam and Richard Nixon got nailed for it and had to resign.

If Whatsisface got nailed for lying, he wouldn’t even change his tie. He has turned it into an art form. Every morning we read the Times and ask ourselves, “How can the man not be amazed at his own naked bravado? Does the man not have a pair of pants?” He once built ugly apartment buildings and hotels and now he is a world leader who stands for an hour in New York, a city that despises him, and stands naked in the U.N. for twice his allotted time and they sit quietly and applaud at the end. Does no one possess a gavel? Is this just one big practical joke by the Queens Deutscher Bund trying to trick us dummkopfs into wearing lederhosen?

Or is this an entirely new strategy called “Flooding The Zone”? The sheer blatant open-faced unashamed lying desensitizes us so that truth is no such thing and the New York Times becomes the New York Thens and the Post becomes the Stump and the U.S. Constitution becomes the Substitution and then where will we be?

Sitting right here in a chair looking out the window on a sunny day in New York, missing the newspaper. If you think I’m a Democrat, you’re wrong, I’m curious, I’m a human being, I like stories. I read the Personals. (Man, 45, seeks younger woman for mutual adventure and comfort.) Use your brain, Wayne. The concubine trade faded out two centuries ago and now you need to begin with acquaintance, then friendship, then close friendship, and then maybe what you had in mind. But only maybe, not definitely.

There is more to life than politics, much more. The stories coming out of divorce court and child custody cases have the makings of tragic opera — and this is in Minnesota Nice, the land of languid Lutherans — well, guess again. I could tell you stories — and also the Letters of the Lovelorn (“He flirts with old friends of mine and our children’s teachers”). If the rich and famous wind up in divorce court, the story can get very thick, and if one lover shoots another, the story becomes an opera. What the Minnesota Star Tribune passes up every day would keep Puccini busy composing until next Easter.

Great intellects in college read Sartre and Camus and went to Bergman and Godard movies so I traveled to Europe long ago to be broadened and deepened but instead was darkened. I flew to Amsterdam and could only think of Anne Frank who felt like a personal friend and the Lutherans who tried to ignore fascism or accommodate it. The ghosts of history, the castles built to isolate the aristocracy from deadly plagues. The massacres of World War I, generals employing 19th-century strategy against 20th-century weaponry. The odd English regard for monarchy, paying people so lavishly to stand on a balcony and wave. Do they have no lifelike manikins? The cathedrals holding their own dark secrets. And then the truth dawns on the youth: they came to America to get away from the disease, the aristocracy, the vicious generals, the dimwit doctors who employed bloodletting and enemas and thereby killed their patients but kept doing it. And now here is tabloid trash from Queens trying to reestablish monarchy in America where our people came to make a new start.

The bowing and kissing, the lying, loyalty as a prime virtue ahead of public service: this is not how it’s supposed to be.

My teachers at Anoka High School, Stan Nelson and Frayne Anderson, were there at the beach on D-Day to save European civilization. We asked questions and they talked very matter-of-factly about it. Were they scared? Maybe but they were too busy doing their jobs. And now it’s time to come home and save our own civilization. But you know that.

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A word of advice from your elder

It is a beautiful October in Manhattan thanks to global warming and I understand it’s a balmy fall in Minnesota too, though Minnesota needs a good freeze to tell the farmers it’s time to harvest. There are few farmers left still farming in Minnesota, thanks to robotic harvesters — old Zeke looks up from his computer screen and says, “Alexa, pick the pumpkins,” and it’s done.

There are twice as many professional humorists as farmers these days as well I know. And now everybody’s son and stepdaughter are lining up to get a degree in Stand-Up. Yes, you’re right, it’s a B.S. and that’s all you need nowadays, and so I’ve had to take up teaching. And I do stand-up at nursing homes where all the jokes are fresh, even the one about the old man who came into a bar and sat next to a young woman and said, “Do I come in here often?”

I like young people so I shop at Trader Joe’s where the clientele is less than half my age and the conversation in the checkout line is eager and fresh, not full of resentment at the high prices, and I look at the cashiers and wonder which of them are actors and which writers, working p.t. to make rent and snitch some produce and breakfast cereal. You can tell the dancers by the fact that they look agonized — the truth is dawning on them: I can’t do ballet because I have the wrong body, I have hips and a butt.

I was spared the torture of ballet because my parents were fundamentalists and believed that dancing was erotic and sinful, even if you did it on your toes with your arms above your head, so I became a comedian. As you can see.

I read Thurber and Perelman and Benchley in the eighth grade so my goal was to be published in their magazine, The New Yorker, to see my own brilliant wit in narrow columns between stylish ads for Van Cleef & Arpels and the Ritz (from which we get the word “ritzy,” which only I use anymore) and the 1956 Oldsmobile DeLuxe.

I alone am left from that era. I remember when fiction was written with fountain pen on paper, which was the equivalent of cutting soybeans with a scythe and loading the crop onto horse-drawn wagons, and fiction writers under the age of forty don’t realize how much they’ve lost. I can distinguish dialogue that is handwritten with a pen from that which is computed and so can most readers: the plasticity gives it away.

This brief but heartfelt essay was written with a No. 2 pencil on a Roy Rogers tablet. I tell my creative writing students at Juilliard that all you need is that first big success. And your chances are improved about 85% if you write by hand on a tablet. There’s a connection between hand and ear — ask any otolaryngologist.

Yes, I said Juilliard. That was not a typo. People waste decades in repetitive practice trying to master the violin only to become “fair to middling” and why bother when you can tell a joke perfectly the first time you utter it. Go ahead. Read it aloud.

How many violinists does it take to change a lightbulb?

How many?

Fifty.

FIFTY????

Read the contract.

I had two students, brothers Peter and Patrick Peabody, who were violinists and conjoined at the hip, which was fine in a string quartet but Patrick was gay and Peter was Baptist and homophobic. But Peter found Sarah and Patrick had Harry and somehow they made it work, don’t ask me how. But Peter was a terrific violinist and Patrick was so-so.

I suggested to Patrick that he become a writer, that a novel
about a gay fiddler conjoined to his disapproving brother might be an interesting premise; he said, “I promised Harry I would respect his privacy.”

Did I mention that Harry discovered, watching Mary and Peter, that he was bi? Well, I should’ve. And it’s hard to keep this secret when you’re dealing with conjoined twins.

In a fit of rage, Patrick practiced his ass off and outshone Peter at an audition and Peter took to drink and because they shared the same circulatory system both were drunk and Patrick shot him with a pistol and Mary killed Patrick and married Harry and in Minnesota a husband cannot testify against his wife and so all turned out well in the end. All it needs is the music. Where is Mozart when you need him?

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The perils of a summer September

The temperature dropped a little this week, from the 80s into the 70s, a relief for us elderly who go back before global warming. I like winter and we used to get a touch of it in late September, a few snowflakes, a little frost on the windows. Winter is a beautiful time of quietude and reflection. Weathermen talk about Minnesota being “hit” by a snowstorm but snow doesn’t hit, it falls gently to the ground and lies there until plowed or shoveled.

I was around before lightweight thermal wear was developed and I walked to school through waist-high drifts knowing that if coyotes caught me and took me to their den and devoured me, the world would get along just fine in my absence, and so I was alert to coyote sounds and didn’t dally and felt great relief when I walked into Benson School.

Winter served its purpose: to teach us that, as Galileo said, the world doesn’t revolve around us or exist for our comfort and pleasure. It has a will of its own.

Summer weather in September isn’t good for this country; it leads to moral relaxation. A big crowd of generals and admirals sat and quietly listened to their crazy Commander’s meandering speech inviting them to join in a domestic war against his political opposition and they politely clapped instead of rising up and grabbing the demented man and clapping him into custody. Their oath is to defend the Constitution, not him, and his suggestion to establish a police state should’ve been met with force. But the weather made them dozy.

Craziness and stupidity are a dangerous combination and you find less of it in folks in the North because the wolves and coyotes eat them or they fall through the ice. If you planted the Commander in a cabin in northern Minnesota with a pair of skis and no phone, he’d be helpless. You can’t impress a grizzly by waving a fistful of cash at him.

The world is changing rapidly but some things remain the same. A great many young people worked hard in college studying computer science — young people whose education is about to be suddenly obsolete thanks to AI, but the ability to speak English clearly and persuasively and with grace and humor is as valuable as ever, maybe more so. And the Commander’s stumblebum hourlong mumbling embarrassment in front of dedicated officers should’ve been the end of him, but the show goes on. He strode to his executive helicopter and the Marine at the door saluted just as smartly as ever.

We seem to be watching the Fall of the Roman Empire in our lifetime. The Romans accepted inept emperors and the Germans let the gas out of them, pffffffffffffffft, and it was goodbye Ovid and hello Henry. This is history, you should look it up sometime.

I hold my generation responsible for the narcissist songwriters and pious progressives who prompted America to elect this corrupt and proudly ignorant regime in which patriotism is replaced by personal fealty. Hardworking tax-paying immigrants are flown to foreign gulags, meanwhile the palace crowd is cashing in on public office. Mencken predicted that the White House would be adorned by a downright moron one day and here he is. We have him.

It seems to me that we Episcopalians used to pray for the president of the U.S.A. and now we don’t anymore. I guess today he might be included among the Sick and Distressed.

I had uncles who were Republicans but they distrusted generals going back to their own days in the military and they had a low opinion of politicians. The Pentagon Papers proved them right. They’d be astounded by the Quantico Follies.

The Republican Party is trying to deal with the Commander the same way you’d deal with your daughter if she went to live with a 400-pound guy with swastikas tattooed on his face and a proclivity for triple quarter pounders and peppermint vodka — you’d be polite, invite him into your home, and not indicate by the slightest wince or groan your utter disgust, but so far this approach is not working and now you are praying that please, Dear Lord, may there not be offspring.

What Washington needs is four feet of snow and two weeks of minus-40 lows and let the gentleman sit in his Evil Office and think these things through more clearly.

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A quiet weekend on the Upper West Side

The priest at church Sunday morning said, clear as a bell, “Do not be afraid. Receive the news with joy.” He was not referring to the Sunday Times, I believe, though I hadn’t read it and was feeling pretty good on a summery Sunday in September having been to hear a Schumann piano quintet the night before played by the Callisto Quartet and Philip Edward Fisher that really rocked out, it was what “Great Balls of Fire” could’ve been if Jerry Lee Lewis had been to Juilliard and studied composition.

I didn’t want to go to the concert but my wife said, “Great music is good for the soul,” so I went and she is right. Schumann suffered terribly back in the early 19th with seven kids to support and Brahms to compete with and he went mad and died young, but here is this great work that, played by brilliant young talents, can shake your nerves and rattle your brain in good ways, even if you’re old like me.

Old age is the age of gratitude and I have more to be grateful for than you kids do. Chicken in a package from a cooler rather than flapping its wings as I carry it by the ankles to the chopping block. I’m grateful for the inferior drugs that were passed around at parties in the Sixties in Minneapolis and rather than be a goody two-shoes I sniffed it and smoked it and it was like sniffing powdered sugar and smoking used coffee grounds, all the high-grade stuff went to rich people in New York, and now look at Washington and see what heavy price was paid in cognitive skills. If you and I had had that stuff, we’d still be in recovery talking about our parents and how they failed to affirm our sense of self-worth.

Back then, my sense of self-worth was none of my parents’ concern, it had to do with how well I did my job, and I did it very well and it wasn’t easy. I was a parking lot attendant in a crew of four — two ticketers, a flagman, and a parker — and I was the flagman. It was a gigantic gravel lot, no painted lines, capacity of 300 cars, and my job was simple: the drivers believed in individual liberty and I had to be the heartless dictator to stifle freedom and direct them to the correct parking space, otherwise chaos would ensue, cars jammed in and preventing passage, anarchy, possible violence, and so I, a Christian gentleman, learned to yell at people, including women who were some of the worst offenders.

We stood in church Sunday and prayed for the world, for the sick, for the forgiveness of our sins, and I also gave thanks for the laptop computer and the cellphone. Grateful for the little garbage pail icon that lets me throw whole documents over the cliff and into the sea. I used my cellphone to snap a picture of my wife on her birthday in a French café courtyard in Soho and send it instantly to a dozen pals — imagine doing this in 1966, the Kodak Brownie, the week waiting for the development, the postage, the addressing of envelopes.

And I gave thanks for my friend Father Bill Teska who passed to Glory a couple weeks ago, the Episcopal priest who told me that the beauty of ritual worship is that you can do it even if you don’t feel like it, which is when it’s most important to do it. He said that if you listen for God you will hear Him, that it all begins with faith and then you seek understanding. Bill thought awe and wonderment were the beginning. And eventually I went back to the Episcopal Church and indeed God’s presence is felt.

When my daughter was born, Bill baptized her, a big booming baritone in full regalia, proclaiming the faith as she lay fascinated by his big black beard and held onto his pendant. And now, twenty-seven years later, I’m still grateful for the blessing that she is. To others I may be a conundrum and a bump in the road but to her, God help me, I am an emperor of love and delight. Darling, I’m doing my best.

I am grateful for simplicity, for the principle of “Less is more,” for the idea of deletion, which is much easier now with the laptop computer, an entire key devoted to it.

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The pleasure of talking to Sarah

I got a call Thursday from a Lutheran pastor in Iowa saying she was running for Congress and would I contribute money to her campaign and we talked for a little while. I was busy working on a book and could’ve said so but there was something unusual about her — her voice wasn’t loud, it didn’t grind, she didn’t talk in paragraphs, she talked in sentences and then she stopped and let me talk.

I told her that the news has been making me dizzy for months and now the lucrative deals between the Arab emirates and the Witkoff and Trump families and the FCC threat to cancel the licenses of networks that broadcast criticism of the Administration is taking us into a shadowy land of unreality that should arouse outrage but has become commonplace. But I was impressed that this soft-spoken woman was entering the fray. I’ve poked fun at Lutherans for years and they enjoyed it. They are hopeful people who look around and see the goodness of life.

Her name is Sarah Trone Garriott and she’s running in Iowa’s Third Congressional District as a Democrat. I looked up a news story about the race and saw that her opposition was portraying her as a radical out-of-touch lefty who would “allow men to play in girls’ sports” and the deliberate deceit of those words convinced me to send a donation.

The planet is heating up, Putin is trying to re-create Czarist Russia, men are going into schools and shooting kids, armed men are rounding up hardworking immigrants and sending them to gulags in other countries, planeloads of Guatemalan kids are headed for God knows where, wackos are taking over the public health field, billionaires are gorging at the public trough, and you think that Jimmy thinking he’s Joanie is a major issue for Congress?

Our government is cutting billions in foreign aid to low-income countries, cuts that are estimated to result in the deaths of almost five million children in the next five years — a whole holocaust caused by one man with a swish of his big felt-tip pen. This is a strange road for this wealthy country to take.

Senator Grassley of Iowa has introduced a bill to help victims of age discrimination. He is 92. I imagine that, as a Republican, he’s opposed to men playing in girls’ sports and opposed to your grandma joining the Boy Scouts and your cousin Harry being admitted to the Sisters of Mercy. Well, I am too, but in the long list of public issues, I don’t see these as higher than 107th.

I am 83 years old and maybe this is dementia talking but I accept that the needs of the young take precedence over mine. I am opposed to cutting languages and music and drama from public school curriculums in order to pay for Viagra and other erectile therapies for elderly males. I accept that erectile dysfunction is God’s way of saying men over 80 probably shouldn’t father children. I also believe you needn’t accept that I am 35 simply because I feel I am 35, which some days I do, but I keep it to myself, I don’t make it into a Cause.

I would be very wary of criminalizing ageism. It’s a squishy subject and in the long run ageism ranks lower than, say, discrimination against people with tattooed faces.

This is only my opinion and you don’t have to respect it. And if your face happens to be covered with dark tattooed leafy shapes with a balcony and pennants on your forehead, and girders tattooed on your neck and your name tattooed on your tongue, I accept your right to insist on being recognized as a minority who must not be discriminated against on the basis of w-e-i-r-d-n-e-s-s. But I hope that my party, the Democratic Party, with its noble history of standing up for minority rights, does not take up disfigurement rights or the right to decide your own age. I would consider this a death wish on the part of Democrats.

I may be wrong about this. If so, disfigurement rights may have to wait until we octos pass from the scene, including the ones who identify as teenagers.

I also believe you cannot invent a new language simply by moving your fingers slightly to the right on the keyboard and expect English speakers to accept yjod ;smhishr sd ;rhoyo,syr/ — okay? As for the FCC taking away licenses, I accept the President’s right to say whatever he thinks, no matter how nutty, and I hope he enjoys exercising the right.

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Balcony at night, looking at Manhattan

I don’t keep track of my stock portfolio for the simple reason I am utterly ignorant, having skipped Econ in college — too boring — so in the world of finance I am a mountain climber with no lantern or map and I hear woofing up ahead and hope to find a hut and a hermit who will offer me lodging. To me, it makes as much sense as Friday night bingo at Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy except not as sociable.

It does seem though that even with the national deficit rising and unemployment too and consumer pessimism and nobody has any idea where our Leader’s mood on tariffs is heading, Wall Street sees a candle in the window and is following the rainbow. The investment bank sends me a summary on the first of the month, and it keeps climbing and climbing, even with me without a map.

I was brought up by Christian pessimists who had seen the Dirty Thirties so I am trying to prepare myself for a crash and big black headlines, BANK STOCKS SKID, FED HEAD QUITS, MARKETS CLOSE AT NOON in which event I guess we’d sell the apartment at a big loss and pack our bags and move back to Minnesota and buy a house with a garden so we don’t have to fight people for food at the supermarket. But no black headlines appeared today, only small ones about our Leader’s bosom buddy Jeffrey Epstein so my darling and I go around the corner to Piatto Grande and she has two glasses of the Sicilian wine, not the Montana one, and we each have our own salad and don’t split one, and I have the linguini with meatballs.

My needs are modest. I don’t own a car because I have double vision. I travel in my line of work, show business, and otherwise am a homebody. I spent my middle years working terribly hard to make up for a lack of talent due to an evangelical background that told me, “Don’t show off” so I struggled to shed modesty, and I had no time for TV so I lost track of popular culture — I look at the gossip columns and don’t know who the celebrities are anymore — I may as well be Amish. But this life suits me. If you’re a writer and have a few friends and you marry well and have a humorous daughter, you hardly need anything else. And I went to church Sunday so my sins are forgiven.

People come to New York with a dream in mind and mine was to be an important writer and win a Pullet Surprise or the National Booger Wart, but for those prizes, you have to dress up and sit at a banquet for three hours and listen to some blowhard talk about the role of imaginative literature in a democratic society and I’d rather take a walk in Central Park and listen to the pickup jazz band playing Ellington’s “Take the A-Train” by the reservoir as the ground shakes from the A train underground, a runner pushing his little daughter in a cart, dog walkers, Frisbee players playing pickle in the middle, and the kindergarteners leashed together like sled dogs, heading for a grassy slope to be unleashed and go dashing around, yelling, laughing, apartment kids accustomed to hours of imprisonment with irritable parents and now, whoopee! thrilled by freedom of movement, competitive leaping, somersaulting, hopscotching, jitterbugging. So much public happiness.

It’s a beautiful fall and the city feels optimistic, let people in Wichita imagine it as a brutal battleground and rat-infested garbage dump, the residents know different. Yes, rents are high and that’s for the simple reason that so many people want to live here. Last night, sitting on the balcony under the starry sky, arm around my sweetheart, gazing at the landscape of lights, she holds up her cellphone with the app that identifies the planes in the sky on their approach to LaGuardia, coming in from Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Rochester, Miami. She came here from Minnesota as a teenager to be a classical violinist and had fifteen good years before she hitched up with me. I came here because my 8th grade teacher showed me a copy of The New Yorker and I wanted to write funny stuff in among cartoons and fancy ads for ritzy hotels and snazzy jewelry, in the same type font as A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell. Now we have each other. Who could ask for more?

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September, wishing I had me a Pronto Pup

I feel a little sad and sort of disenfranchised in September heading for October and for the fourth year in a row having missed the Minnesota State Fair and not eaten Pronto Pups or cheese curds or hot buttered corn on the cob. I am a Minnesotan, though I live in New York, and as such am sensible, wary of excess, and the Fair is our annual Feast Of Things You’ve Been Warned Against. We go see the livestock barns, the various gaudy breeds of poultry, bins of grains and vegetables in the Horticulture Building, watch the horse judging, but while walking the grounds we pick up our favorite forbidden foods, all of them portable. Walking gives us privacy and also aids in digestion. There is now a Fair Food app that will guide you to a Frozen Mango Tango or S’mores or Bison Meatballs. You take a break on the Ferris wheel and a carousel to settle the contents in your gut and then top off the day with a dish of Hawaiian Sunrise shaved ice and take yourself home to repent with a double Alka-Seltzer.

This is an extravagant exercise in the unwise that can plant your feet back on the straight and narrow just as releasing a bombshell of profanity can cleanse the heart of anger or listening to three Rolling Stones albums in a row can make you grateful to be elderly and leading a peaceable life.

The Fair is also one time when we’re all together in one place, the anti-vaxxers and the p.c. police, the radical Marxists, the Flat Earthers, the Apocalyptic Baptists, and so far nobody has suggested that Pronto Pups contain an enzyme that will make you accept the Establishment version of the news.

The Fair was created by farm organizations as a gathering of farmers and their families, to see the latest machinery and learn about innovations and compete for blue ribbons and also to connect with each other and have a good time. The prosperous grain farmers of western Minnesota and the big poultry and hog and beef producers and also my people, the marginal 150-acre dairy farmers who raised feed for the cattle and a few chickens for eggs and a vegetable garden to feed the family. Holstein cows were a generous animal who enabled hardworking families to wrest a living from hilly, rocky land no good for big crops. As a boy, visiting the farm, I sensed not much delight in the lives of Holsteins. They knew they were not kept around because the farmer loved them. Horses had names, Brownie, Pete, Prince, and cows didn’t, same as your lawnmower didn’t or the hand pump. They were simply a means to an end, machines for making milk, and when their productivity declined, they’d be led up a ramp onto a truck and shipped away to be turned into hamburger.

My dad had four sisters and three brothers. None of the girls married a farmer and only one of the boys became a farmer. All of them saw hard times up close as the Depression closed in. They saw hunger and broken lives and despair around them and determined to avoid it. All but one of them became a gardener. They read about starvation in Europe after the war, people foraging in the garbage for edibles, people eating rodents, dogs. My dad kept a half-acre garden, which fed his six kids. I grew up, never thinking about malnourishment except as something you read about in books. My generation rebelled against the farm life and sought freedom to be carefree, maybe wild. We wrote poetry. We imagined becoming interesting individuals. We were ready for rock ’n’ roll to shake our nerves and rattle our brain, break our will but what a thrill, great balls of fire.

Jerry Lee Lewis wouldn’t have been tolerated back in hard times with people going hungry. We thought it was rebellious but really it was the product of prosperity created by hardworking farmers and gardeners. So I went to the Fair for the Pronto Pup and the cheese curds but also to walk around the barns and mingle with farmers — you could pretty well distinguish them from the accountants and schoolteachers — and take deep breaths of farm smells and think about my ancestors. My grandpa James Keillor, an old man bundled up on a bitter cold day in 1925, pitchfork in hand, grinning, the pleasure of working hard outdoors.

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A trip to the land of old paint and new art

I went to Santa Fe to see some friends last week and it dawned on me that I’m a Northern guy with a keen sense of my insignificance who aims to be inconspicuous and that many Northerners go to Santa Fe to be picturesque. I saw grown men dressed up as desperadoes, wearing sombreros, black shirts with silver buttons, gaudy cowboy boots. I left that look behind when I turned twelve, the age at which you start to realize that work and competence are what give you your identity, not your outfit.

God designed Minnesota so we wouldn’t be distracted by mountains and could concentrate on getting the work done, cultivating the corn, picking potatoes. You don’t wear reds, yellows, and oranges, it would only attract blackbirds.

I saw people in Santa Fe wearing loose garments, the accoutrements of mysticism, scarves and jewelry and insignia that say, I am me, unique, incomparable, the sort of stuff that was worn by twentyish folk back in the Seventies.

I am old enough to remember hippies. I once watched Allen Ginsberg chanting what sounded like English while playing mysterious chords on a harmonium to a hundred people listening intently as wisps of incense drifted around the room. A nice Jewish boy from New Jersey who achieved fame for being beyond comprehension. I considered the option of incomprehensibility but gave it up when I took a wife and we had a child. And I found that the everyday world of ordinary people is so incredibly interesting that to separate oneself from it seems ridiculous.

But that’s what I saw in Santa Fe, people who probably once held down good jobs in management, investment banking, condo construction, and could then retire financially secure, to become painters. Humidity is low in the Southwest so the paint dries faster. The town is full of galleries, and not all of the art is of steer skulls and sunsets but a great deal is and some is Post-Pictorial Pueblo, giant canvases of desert landscape, studies in brown, tan, bronze, beige, burnt sienna, dust, and dusky.

Georgia O’Keeffe painted here, an artist who painted leaves that she intended to be seen as vaginas. In Minnesota, where trees are plentiful, you might collect leaves in scrapbooks but you would not see them as genitalia and you would avoid people who do. You wouldn’t want them to live next door and invite you over to look at large canvases of a suggestive nature. If you quit your day job in Bismarck or Kansas City and took up painting cow skulls and sunsets, they would laugh you out of town, but in Santa Fe you’d fit right in. Instead of blizzards you’d deal with lizards, but high-heeled cowboy boots would deal with that.

My friends who moved there said they were seeking a slower laid-back way of life, which I see as a tragic mistake but they didn’t ask me. Slow and laid-back comes naturally as you enter your Seventies and the goal should be a brisk and upright lifestyle. Laid-back will come inevitably, as you develop back problems, and you may be unable to pull yourself back into a sitting position and then you will be shipped to a pueblo for the prostrate.

I’m all in favor of freedom for the elderly and discipline for the young. The young need to become very good at work in a field where it’s clear who is and who is not. Health care, for example, is not recreational. Teaching, also. There are hundreds of others. Some may seem lowly, such as plumbing, but when a family’s toilet system goes crazy, the plumber’s status suddenly rises above that of every artist in town, every poet.

I walked into an Apple store this week with a laptop with a bad power connection and a few strides into the store I found myself in the hands of intense competence by polite young men who took an old man from the Underwood era and spoke to him in comprehensible English and solved the problem in about twelve minutes and charged me $19. I put a hand on my man’s shoulder and said, “I’m a writer, I have a book manuscript in there, I walked in with visions of disaster and I am grateful for your competence and professionalism at a time when the country is on the skids, and I thank you wholeheartedly.” We shook hands. He made my day. We need more of him.

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