Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 11

My breakfast at Denny’s in Minot

I walked into an AT&T shop the other day and bought a new iPhone to replace my antique model and a bright young man waited on me who spoke what I’m fairly sure was English but which may as well have been Czech or Sanskrit. He asked dozens of questions to which I had no answers so he answered them himself and sold me a fine new phone that can do thousands of things, only four of which I need: to call people on the phone, to text, to read the paper, and locate the nearest drugstore. Or café. Or ATM. Or hospice, when it comes time for that.

I was once a bright young person myself. I was born because my parents couldn’t keep their hands off each other even as war was raging in Europe and they should’ve been focused on foreign policy and doing what they could for the war effort but no, they jumped into bed and made love, and out I came. I was doted on by my aunts who felt my timidity hid some profound talent. Autism hadn’t been discovered yet so I was labeled “gifted” instead.

I grew up in Minnesota where I saw my uncle Jim milk cows by hand, which cured me of any interest I had in farming or any other sort of hard work. And after breakfast he read aloud from Isaiah about the heart being corrupt and we knelt on a hard floor and prayed and it made me want to find a different church where the heart is kind and we’d kneel on cushions. Because I was no good in math or physics, I was put into shop class in high school where my carelessness around power tools terrified my teacher Mr. Buehler and he sent me to Miss Person’s speech class where, standing up and speaking, I felt Special. Very. If I wasn’t, then why were all these kids looking up at me and listening? This led to my present career as a stand-up comic and Episcopalian.

I had breakfast at Denny’s in Minot with a preacher named Barry who tried to tell me that God has a plan for my life. It was fun to be preached at over eggs and sausage and be able to talk back, which I cannot do in my Episcopal church in New York where the rector speaks from a high pulpit and I’d need to shout, which Episcos do not do in church. That is for the charismatics. We are attractive but not charismatic.

Barry was full of hope for our world and believed that each of us has an assignment from the Father to advance righteousness on Earth. This, in North Dakota, a state that will vote for a 78-year-old lunatic felon for President. But I listened to the man, impressed by his good humor, his faith in the future, though I’m not eager to know God’s plan for me. I assume it involves poverty. It usually does.

I was poor in the late Sixties and had to live rent-free in my in-laws’ basement and I don’t wish to do it again. They were sympathetic about it but it was painful coming upstairs and waiting my turn to use the bathroom. I don’t relish being pitied; I’d sort of prefer to be resented, if you want to know the truth.

I live with my wife in a two-bedroom apartment in a nice neighborhood of Manhattan from which we can look at God’s sunsets over New Jersey. Sometimes the sky darkens over there and strokes of lightning strike to show the fraudulent that God is aware of their doings. I pay for my good view by having a very nice job. I have no interest in cellar dwelling. I have other people in mind for that. Felons, for example.

God has ways of getting a person’s attention and recently I was frightened by the disappearance of my novel-in-progress from my computer hard drive but then a friend found it in a cloud where I suppose the Almighty stuck it. Since then I have been backing up religiously but you can’t outmaneuver the Lord.

Barry made an impression on me. I bathe, I floss, I do squats and sit-ups and lunges, I pray for my country that it not buy the truckloads of horse manure being peddled by dishonest felons, but there is more to be done. Meanwhile, I wait for enlightenment and drink coffee.

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A report on my trip to Fargo

I got off a Delta flight in Fargo, N.D., last week and heard a brass band playing “Over There” and found the terminal packed with hundreds of people waving flags, holding up signs, welcoming a planeload of men returning from Washington who, I was told, were veterans who’d gone to the capital to see the sights. Many of them were old guys like me, Vietnam vets, and some were younger, from the Iraq and Afghanistan era, and the crowd was very boisterous and happy as they came down the escalator and the thirty-piece band, sitting at music stands, played through “From the halls of Montezuma” and “When the caissons go rolling along” and “Off we go into the wild blue yonder” and “Anchors aweigh, my boys” and the crowd was clapping along with these old upbeat tunes about the giddy pleasure of going off to war.

Little kids got caught up in the spirit of the moment and so did I, even though it meant that my baggage took forever to show up. A woman walked over to the band and yelled, “You sound great!” which simply wasn’t true — they sounded like a bunch of middle-aged men who enjoyed playing music without having to practice regularly, but it was such a happy occasion, I had assumed at first it was for a returning victorious football team or perhaps National Guardsmen returning from a tour in Kosovo, but no, it was simply for old vets returning from a vacation trip.

It’s rare that you hear George M. Cohan’s “Over There” played these days due to the sheer stupidity of the words —

So prepare, say a prayer,
Send the word, send the word to beware
We’ll be over, we’re coming over,
And we won’t come back till it’s over, over there.

— so utterly and absurdly incongruous with the brutality of the collision of European empires in 1917, the expense of 20 million lives, men fighting in mass formations against modern weaponry, the Allied victory that laid the foundation for the Nazis and Holocaust and World War II, a dance of death, a jaunty Broadway tune celebrating masses of men dashing from trenches across open fields into bursts of machine-gun fire, all to preserve a rickety antique class of dukes with chestsful of medals and pom-poms on their hats.

To the best of my knowledge, nobody wrote a clever upbeat song about the glory of Vietnam.

Carry on, carry on,

Jim and John, greet the dawn, weapons drawn,

Don’t be slow, off we go to Saigon.

 I speak as a draft dodger. I was ordered to report and did not and never paid a price for it. I have told this to men who served in Vietnam and they said, “You did the right thing.” A cousin who served there wrote back: “Do whatever you need to do to avoid coming here.” Some people had hangnails, some got a psychiatrist’s excuse, some dropped acid before the interview, some joined the Guard. I knew people who went and all these years later it’s clear how it messed up their lives. They came back torn in invisible ways, having seen friends killed in a stupid war to uphold the reputations of dishonest politicians. Look at the Pentagon Papers that Daniel Ellsberg smuggled out to the press, detailing the dishonesty of our government to its own citizens.

The people at the airport were having a party out of affection for their uncles and brothers, and that’s a sweet thing. But I saw some ancient vets in wheelchairs who seemed confused by the cheering and a little worried about how they’d find a ride home.

I know people who live in Ho Chi Minh City and have a nice life there and it seems that the communism we sent men to Vietnam to fight turns out to be simply another impenetrable bureaucracy in which, like the Cosa Nostra or the Republican Party, it helps to know the right people and say the right things at all times without exception.

I was ordered by my government to report for basic training and I violated the law of the land and I got away with it and in fact thrived mightily, and men I knew obeyed the law and suffered horribly for it.

A couple nights later, I did a show at an amphitheater nearby and 600 people stood and sang “America the Beautiful” and the Battle Hymn of the Republic a cappella as the sun went down. They sounded fabulous. It’s a great country, folks. But what strange times.

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A beautiful Sunday in September

I am a morning person, it is when I do my best work, and it took me until I was 40 to realize this plain fact, which is a shame, I being 82 now, which is why I intend to live to be 97 as my mother did, so I won’t have wasted half my life, only two/fifths. I spent twenty years trying to be an evening person by downing a glass of Scotch and then a glass of wine or two or three so as to be charming and witty, but for Christians glamor and wittiness is a steep and rocky path, we are meant to be productive, but the hangover from the Scotch and wine clouded my mornings and made my writing dark and ironic like Kafka’s, stories of hopeless struggle against a mysterious fate, which I don’t believe, I believe in redemption.

I quit drinking by quitting it. I didn’t want to spend a couple weeks in treatment at Alky Camp dealing with my underlying problems, I just wanted to ditch the Scotch so I did. I drank ginger ale instead. I also stopped smoking one day. I’d been a chain-smoker because I thought that’s what writers do, but all I really enjoyed was lighting the cigarette and exhaling, the inhaling part made me feel bad, so I stopped. I kept a pencil in my pocket and if I needed to, I stuck it in my mouth.

Every morning I remember how bad I used to feel and how good I feel now. It’s a good way to begin the day. Sunday was glorious in Manhattan and I had my coffee, avoiding the Times, which would only scare me badly, and after looking around for my glasses, which, as it turned out, were parked on my head, I hiked to church for the 10 a.m. service, scootched into the pew, prayed for Kamala who carries our hope for decency in America, and then heard the organist Brother John strike up “Just A Closer Walk With Thee,” odd for an Episcopal service, in a very danceable tempo.

I love this about my church, we often come to the verge of euphoria but being Anglican we resist, we suppress wild euphoria to produce a quiet joy, not like the charismatic sects who raise their arms in the air and dance around and speak in tongues, but some people speak better in tongues than others, French people for example and Chinese, so it turns show-offy and makes the less euphoric and monolingual feel inferior, whereas we Episcopalians remain seated and simply feel giddy and very very happy. We confess our sins, such as failing to RSVP promptly to invitations and not attending a seminal play by an important playwright though we know seminal things are good for us, and then we shake hands and wish each other Peace, and we sing “Leaning On The Everlasting Arms,” which makes me think of my aunts, and I shake hands with the minister and walk down Amsterdam past the Hispanic Catholic church just letting out.

I stop at Trader Joe’s and buy salad makings and coffee and cereal, bread and cheese, frozen mac and cheese, and get in line with couples with kids in strollers and old guys and young women with witty T-shirts, and head for home past lunchers in sidewalk cafés and fruit vendors and bikes whizzing past.

I love New York City. I’m a Minnesotan, I’m an alien here, but after this year I know that America is not my country anymore. There is no argument about this. Any country in which Donald J. Trump is a serious candidate for Chief Magistrate is not my country. So no matter the result of the election, I plan to stop reading the news and live in my immediate surroundings, my neighbors, my church, the folks on the subway, the kids studying in the library, the walkers in the park. Mr. Trump is an old joke in New York. He couldn’t get elected garbage inspector. Only in the Midwest and South is he a power. So it’s their country and they can do with it what they will. I’m 82 and I plan to enjoy the rest of my life and if he uses the Army to deport ten million people and lets Putin reassemble the Soviet Union and jails Joe Biden and cuts billions in funding of public schools, that is for the New York Times to worry about, not me.

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A fine night in York, Pennsylvania

I walked into the Baltimore airport at 7:15 Friday morning, checked a bag, and walked to the end of the endless Boarding line, which moved swiftly back and forth between the straps, was sniffed by a dog, photographed by a TSA lady, went through the hypermagnetic sonar encephaloscanner, was declared sane, and got to a café near my gate and my coffee was poured at 7:40. A good beginning to a day.

The night before I had done my solo show at the Strand Theatre in York, PA. The stage looked big and empty and I worried that the audience would expect me to dance or do cartwheels so I did the show from the house, walking up and down the aisles, which people seemed to like. I start off by singing a prayer, an Episcopal rouser, an anti-thong song, a hymn to perseverance (“So do your work, keep going straight ahead, and you can be a genius after you are dead”), an homage to summer and a descriptive song about the journey of sperm in search of a willing egg, all from memory while ambulating in close proximity to the customers and shaking a few hands. At first I was blinded by the spotlight and had to tread carefully lest I trip and land in someone’s lap but I ascended about one-third of the way back and then I could see people so I did the show from there — 400 people could see me and for the 200 down front it was like radio.

I told them that Pennsylvania is in a tough spot, as a big swing state, and on Election Night when the state is called, the side it votes for will figure, “Well of course, but why such a narrow margin?” and the other side will despise them and never buy another Hershey’s bar ever. I announced that I was a Kamalaist because I’m tired of my gender being held responsible for leadership, it’s time for women to take their turn. This harmless joke did not land all that well, like the crowd was maybe one-third Trumpian, maybe more, and so I veered off in a patriotic direction — “We’re all Americans and we have more in common than we have to argue about” (a dubious assertion, I know plenty of Americans who, if I were hitchhiking and they picked me up, I’d ask to be let out) and I hummed a note and sang “My country, ’tis of thee” and they were all with me and it was stunningly beautiful. I don’t exaggerate. They sang softly in four-part harmony. So we did “God Bless America” and “Shenandoah” and “My Girl” and “How Great Thou Art,” which most stand-up comics wouldn’t include but I’m 82 and get to make my own rules and the crowd was touched by their own singing.

And then I went into some comical stem-winding about the beauties of old age, one being that your career is over, your ambition is exhausted, and now you get to have fun, which I proceeded to do at length, and we sang the Beatles’ “In My Life” as I exited out through the lobby.

After the show I stood out on the curb and talked to people, not about politics, though a man did point out that York had briefly, during the Revolution, been General Washington’s HQ when the Brits were in Philly and so was the de facto nation’s capital. Okay, then. But I did wonder how these good people could pass up a smart public-spirited well-spoken woman who is up on the issues for an angry real-estate tycoon who has adopted the style of a professional wrestler and who believes that an outrageous lie repeated repeatedly thereby becomes passable. The man is a living satire of male ego and blather. He is also 78 and if you read transcripts of his speeches, you think his family needs to think about conservatorship. The beloved country has a month in which to come to its senses. There is, among young men, a taste for outright fascism that we never had noticed before. Thank you, Taylor Swift. Now where is Laura Bush? Nikki Haley, time to change your mind and save your soul.

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A primer for my friends of middle age

Some lessons are best learned slowly rather than all at once, such as “Don’t attempt to move rapidly indoors in utter darkness, especially if it’s not your house.” It has led to grief for numerous persons, few of whom will ever tell you about it, so it’s a lesson you’ll have to learn on your own, which is the best way.

I, for example, have learned, “Do vigorous exercise while you still can because if you don’t, then you can’t.” Jumping jacks, for example: one day they’re a piece of cake and so you figure, “Why waste the time?” and then you try to do one and it’s very humorous. The same is true of running: one day you can lope along like an elderly but still respectable antelope and then one day strangers will stop you and ask if there’s anything they can do to help. No, there probably isn’t.

There is always an excuse for not exercising, a religious prohibition, some hereditary syndrome that makes you feel desperate when you breathe hard, an allergic reaction to your own perspiration, but these can be overcome with help. My excuse is that I hated high school phy-ed with a passion, the chin-ups, the rope climb, the running somersault, the running dive over the horse, the wrestling, the ridicule and the bullying, and I despised walking naked into a shower with other young men. I still do. After I graduated, I made it a point not to join other naked men to take showers. When invited, I have declined. If this is a favorite activity of yours, I do not judge. For some men, this may be the high point of the week. Don’t say this is self-loathing on my part because it isn’t: it’s the other men I loathe, not myself. And it’s not homophobia. I have many gay male friends and they do not undress when they come to my home. I am perfectly okay taking a shower by myself or with my wife on very rare occasions such as my 70th and 80th birthdays, the Feast Day of the Assumption in August and on October 27, the day on which Jack Morris pitched the Minnesota Twins to a 1-0 victory in the 7th game of the 1991 World Series.

Nonetheless, I do exercises every morning and it makes me feel good. Feeling good is the point.

Another lesson to learn over time is “A feast should be taken in moderation and always followed by an effervescent sodium bicarbonate.” People, even mature intelligent people with advanced degrees, have sat down at a groaning board to platters of roasted wildlife and savory tubers, coagulated milk protein, leafy greens, cruciferous delicacies, and baked desserts, and in the joyfulness of the moment — perhaps someone has commenced from an institution other than a penal one or perhaps someone has had a memoir published or been declared innocent by a jury of his peers — the diners overestimate their capacity.

Some people experience this on a regular basis, and I understand there is treatment for it, and I also feel there is such a thing as saying, “No, thank you” and pushing the plate away. I am doing that this morning. I love steak and eggs for breakfast and I am not having it this morning. I last had it three weeks ago. I am still living.

There usually is someone who can do something better than you can and the time comes when you should let them do it. This happened to me: my wife, Jenny, took the car keys. She’s a terrific driver. The world is better without a man with poor vision careening around the roadways. I honestly believe this to be true.

We grow wise with the years: this is the theory. This year, the Year of Our Lord 2024, I suggest that you not vote for a person who is angry and saying lunatic things detached from reality and promising apocalyptic times to come. That is not for America. God has blessed this country lavishly. Brilliant immigrants have come for freedom from the fevers of Europe and the grinding poverty of leftover colonial empires, and their ingenuity and spirit and wit and their adoration of this New World have enriched us each and every one. Diversity, schmiversity, we simply are a diverse and fascinating assemblage of wonders and oddities, dreamers and floaters, 4-Hers, bellyachers, Unitarians, contrarians, librarians, egalitarians, and Wagnerians — a person walks through town and never lacks for entertainment. God bless America. He has done so before. We need it now.

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My views on journalism if you’re interested

What in God’s name has happened to American newspapering? The Washington Post recently printed pictures from its 25th Annual Travel Photo contest for readers. They also published a column titled “How To Spark Joy In Your Life” and a story about the rescue of an escaped water buffalo in rural Iowa (the story said, “Water buffaloes are unusual in the area” in what one assumes was a humorous aside).

My friends, the Washington Post is in Washington to uncover corruption, malfeasance, ineptitude, and outright dishonesty. That is why God put it there. It is not there to publish photographs of Zion National Park and tell me how to spark joy in my life or cover unusual wildlife in rural Iowa. I swear to God this is the truth. God Himself will spark joy in my life if He chooses to and He can care for rare wildlife too, and if you want to see pictures of national parks, look them up online, you’ll find canyons and geysers and rock formations like you wouldn’t believe.

A man is running for President who is crazy nuts and this is what the Washington Post should be reporting front-page every day with a big headline, Don’t Vote For This Man Or Anyone Who Says The Things He Says.  

I guess newspapers feel they must compete with social media and other trash but I do not turn to TikTok or Instagram to learn about the government I pay my fair share of taxes to on an ongoing basis. I worked hard for that money and I don’t want it to all go to Kentucky just because Mitch McConnell says so. Or go to student loan relief just because somebody put a bug in Joe Biden’s ear. Most colleges are vastly overpriced for the value of the degree. We have state teachers colleges that decided long ago they were universities and the degree from one of them is just a high school graduation certificate with gold borders and a motto in Latin Nimium tu solvisti (You paid too much.). Nobody forgave my student loans when I was a student, back in the previous century. Of course tuition was extremely cheap, about $250 for an academic year and you got to be guided through Milton’s Paradise Lost and English composition and the U.S. Constitution and many other things and also attend free lectures by noted authorities and use the pool tables in the student union, all included in that one low price.

I took journalism courses at the University of Minnesota in which I was required to ask questions of strangers and write down what they told me and work it into a readable narrative with important stuff at the beginning and gradually trailing off into trivia. This education led me into a six-month internship at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, a distinguished publication at the time, a mere shadow of its old self now, but never mind. I sat at the city desk, tuned to the heartbeat of a great city, thanks to my city editor, Mr. Walt Streightiff, who sat at his imperial desk in white shirt, armbands straining his sleeves so the cuffs wouldn’t be sullied by the fresh ink on the galley proofs. He wore a bow tie that he tied himself, it was not a clip-on. A clip-on would be good enough for Willmar or Faribault, not St. Paul where the great dome of the Capitol could be seen up Wabasha Street from the lunchroom where we reporters ate our midnight lunch.

The Capitol was the beat I craved but Irv Letofsky got that beat because he was suspicious of man’s wickedness. I was not; I was a Christian and assumed that others were too. Irv Letofsky, if he was a Christian, which I’m not positive he always was, he was a suspicious Christian. He did not trust public servants any farther than he could throw them and some of them were quite heavy. Irv knew in his hearrt that a politician fears nothing more than a heavy jail sentence. Ask Senator Menendez. Ask Donald J. Trump. Irv longed to send at least one city councilman to jail but he knew that Nate Bomberg would get to cover the trial so what’s the point? Meanwhile, I was stuck writing obits and interviewing minor celebrities such as Robert Frost’s daughter Leslie who is not a big name now nor was she then.

This is why I crave Trump’s defeat, so he can’t pardon himself. He must get down on his hands and knees and beg President Harris to do that. I would give anything to be there.

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A man on a porch by the river

The last lovely days of summer are upon us when I sit on the porch of a little white house across the river from a marina and am grateful it’s not my house and I don’t own a boat. I’m a free man. Someone else gets to clean the gutters and I’m under no obligation to rev up the outboard and take people for a ride up the river and back. I’ve been on several boat rides in my long life and several is enough, I sailed across the Atlantic on the Queen Mary II once, five days in a Hilton that vibrates, hanging out with light-headed people in spangly clothes.

The freedom to not do what you don’t like is basic in a free society. I resist hiking, boating, golfing, climbing; I prefer porching. Summer goes against my nature except when a good thunderstorm comes crashing and flashing in and I observe divine wrath hurled down upon the wicked, it satisfies the Puritan in me. I appear to be a liberal but down deep I am a man in a tall black hat with a buckle on it. And now that the party of Lincoln that was formed to set Black people free from slavery has become the party of yellow golf pants, there isn’t enough lightning to reform it.

This all began when I was a kid. Our house had Scripture verses on the walls, which made us odd, and I wanted to keep this a secret. For example, “Thou shalt not bear false witness” — I enjoyed bearing false witness, was good at it, loved books in which writers made up stuff. But when the yellow golf pants runs for President on the basis of fictions and falsehoods such that fact-checkers have checked into Episcopal rest homes, then puritanism starts to look good.

Sitting here on the porch, I look at the woman sitting ten feet away, whom I love dearly, and she smiles and asks me, “Do you notice something different about me?” A question that strikes dread in my heart.

I don’t want to say, “You got your hair done,” if the correct answer is “You had your lower lip pierced and a large wooden disc inserted in it.” But I don’t see a disc, and she has two arms and two legs and, praise God, she hasn’t shaved one side of her head and dyed the other side green. There is no Q tattoo on her arm. I’m about to say, “I notice how radiant you look,” but she puts a finger to her lips and I notice: lipstick. Pale red. Very cool. It makes me think of Katharine Hepburn who lived just up the road from this little house.

September means school and though I graduated long ago, school is never out, it goes on and on. What Mrs. Moehlenbrock expected of me when I was 12, I now expect of myself, to work up to my potential, to engage with the world, but the world passed me by long ago and in my old age I learn to appreciate small pleasures. Coffee. The river. A toasted muffin with blueberry jam. Conversation. The woman sitting next to me regales me with reminiscence of her grandparents whose porch this once was. I love her stories, I’ve heard enough of my own.

She stands to emphasize a point and I hold out my arms and she sits on my lap, my arms around her. I hold her gently, not grabbily or clutchingly but meaningfully, two independent persons in fine alignment.

When I was 12, I was a teacher’s pet, so I was a target for playground bullies. A boy told me my teeth were green and rotten and I believed him and stopped smiling. And I believed that the Second Coming was imminent and though I was a Christian I wasn’t sure that God realized that. Brother Frank could preach a sermon that made me feel like a war criminal.

But you grow up and experience the generosity of this world. Justice prevails, at least it tries to. I got a good college education on the cheap. The world is full of fascinating individuals who are here for our appreciation. Highly educated people tend to treat you with respect, which is rather stunning. Society will try to do the right thing by you. And this woman will accept my love. So what’s your problem, Mister? Enjoy the day. All of it.

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A little tale about close neighbors

I swear I never thought the day would come when I would arrive for a summer weekend at a rural paradise and suddenly be in a panic that I may have left the charger for my hearing aids at home in the city. I never thought I’d see that day but now I have. I once was young and gay, not gay in today’s sense but what we meant back in 1962, and I could hear a pin drop and now I couldn’t hear a bowling pin if it dropped on my head. I suffered this plague for you, my beloved radio listeners. In your service, I turned the headphones up high because, being young and gay, I felt that music needed to be LOUD to be a full emotional experience, that the body itself needed to vibrate vigorously. I was wrong. I know that now and now is much too late.

At any rate, I did not leave the charger at home, it was simply in a secret compartment of my briefcase, the sort of place one might keep nuclear secrets if there were such a thing, so I wore my hearing aids to dinner at the neighbors’ and so I could understand them to the extent that language is part of understanding. Otherwise, it would’ve been like an evening among the Sanskrit-fluent and I would’ve had to maintain a facial expression of comprehension and curiosity and this is no easy matter. My facial muscle memory is a scowl learned in my fundamentalist youth. It’s hard to overcome the influence of Jeremiah at the age of 82.

I do not understand the neighbors, actually, such as why their summer house has LANDSCAPING and LAWN ORNAMENTS. A summer house is for relaxation, it isn’t to demonstrate craftmanship. You are supposed to sit on the porch and read Proust, you are not supposed to create a home that Proust would’ve envied.

And I don’t understand why a copy of Foreign Affairs sits on their kitchen counter. In the den, out of sight, yes. In the kitchen? People are eating in the kitchen. Foreign Affairs is the diplomatic version of the prophet Jeremiah. He said, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” Foreign Affairs says pretty much the same thing except for real. Ukraine and Gaza are sort of covered in the newspapers but terrible things are happening everywhere, so much so that you don’t want to know about it. Let Antony Blinken know about it. This is why foreign policy is a minor footnote in our presidential elections, somewhat less important than bike lanes or prayer in public schools — can students in English be assigned books in which prayer occurs even if the book is clearly labeled Fiction.

The reason the candidates don’t discuss foreign policy is that they don’t want to scare you. And what would really scare you is how little one of them is even curious about foreign policy and the very good chance that he might be elected president of the most powerful nation on the planet. If you knew, you would want to form your own nation, just as the Danes and Finns have done.

So I made the mistake of asking the woman of the house why the Foreign Affairs, expecting her to say, “Oh, that’s his mishegoss” — she’s Catholic but we all love Yiddish, it really brightens up a sentence — but no, she reads it, she’s in the investment business (I thought women were more noble than that, busy curing cancer and starvation, not hiding income in offshore shelters.) So she starts telling me what she’s recently read in Foreign Affairs and in twenty minutes she cast a dark shadow over the entire evening, which had been all gaiety right up to that exact point.

There were humorous hosts, excellent pasta, fine wine, a lively salad, a beautiful one-year-old boy who really pays attention to people and I swear he is grasping the emotional richness of language and he is eager and ambitious to talk, the child’s proud parents, my own dear wife and daughter, plus me, a published author, and yet in twenty minutes of international trouble spots — she did not leave out many areas, maybe Monaco, maybe Lichtenstein — the effect was to put us all in a blue funk. I tried to lighten the mood with a harmless joke and it wasn’t harmless. It made fun of third-grade teachers, most of whom are probably female, an oppressed lot. So we went home.

Don’t listen to anything about foreign affairs. If someone tries to tell you, take off your hearing aids.

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A close call is a beautiful thing

I am still working full time at the age of 82, which sometimes gives me pause and I wonder, Why? I’ve had a rich full career. I sang on the Grand Ole Opry once. I played Radio City Music Hall, riding up on the stage elevator accompanied by Chet Atkins and Leo Kottke. I once made a movie in which I was kissed by Meryl Streep. Only on the cheek, but still. A portrait of me once appeared in the Seed Art exhibit at the Minnesota State Fair, my face done with seeds, mostly wheat, some corn. I am one of the best limericists in America (There was an attractive stockbroker who beat everybody at poker. Her dress was revealing and also concealing the ace of hearts and the joker.) How much does a man need before he decides it’s enough?

The truth is that I have nothing else to do, no hobbies, no interest in travel, I have no social life because my friends are all in bed by 9 p.m., so I keep working. I know that a man with time on his hands can easily go wrong, even an Episcopalian like me. I could easily drive up to the drive-up window and tell the teller to empty her cash drawer and take the dough to Memphis and find a gin-soaked honky-tonk woman who’ll take me for a ride across her shoulder or, as an alternative, I can write a novel, which is what I was doing this morning.

Does the world need more fiction? Probably not, so long as Donald Trump is running for office. But a writer gets engrossed in a story and although my novel is set in a small town in Minnesota, I stuck a Trumpian character in it and he’s such an absolutely beautiful beautiful guy, completely authentic, an amazing character in every way, that thanks to him I think this is going to be the greatest American novel since Moby-Dick and millions and millions of people are going to buy it. I am already in touch with movie producers. The Marxist Woke DEI critics aren’t going to like it but it’s a beautiful beautiful book. I’ve shown it to dozens of top English professors and they all say the same thing. That it’s beautiful.

Otherwise I am simply trying to mind my own business and be ever grateful for the good things of life. Last Tuesday evening, sitting on a balcony looking out on rooftops of Manhattan, I remembered the time I dashed out onto Interstate 94 to rescue a new mattress I had tied to the roof of my car with twine, and it had blown off the roof due to the aerodynamics of driving 65 mph so I stopped the car, jumped out as my dear wife screamed, “What are you doing?” and hauled the mattress off the highway and got to hear close-up the Doppler effect of a semi air horn passing at high speed a few feet away. Very few persons have had the privilege of hearing that, the 150 dB cry of mortality passing.

It’s an experience that is still quite vivid in my mind: I forget what I ate for breakfast — there’s nothing memorable about bran flakes — but I remember clearly the time I almost sacrificed my life for a mattress. Furniture stores deliver mattresses. Rope would’ve been a better choice than twine. It would’ve been smart to take side streets home rather than the interstate. The sound of “What are you doing?” would’ve been a good cue to stop and reconsider doing it.

I was 56 when I ran back and rescued the mattress and if the semi had hit me as I was doing that and distributed me along the roadside, it would’ve erased some wonderful years, my daughter’s growing-up years, a great deal of fun in the show business, a bunch of lighthearted friendships, and now I can see what a lucky man I am, having outlived Hemingway by twenty years and Buddy Holly by sixty. What brought it to mind was the long blast of a semi horn on Columbus Avenue.

I was sitting on the balcony, trying to describe to a friend the beautiful feeling of focus I get when I walk out to a microphone in front of an audience. Out of the mishmash of life, suddenly there is clarity. The mattress slips off, I hit the brakes, open the door, she yells, there’s a blast of dB and a whoosh, and here I am, still standing.

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Flying out West for a look-see

I flew to Minnesota to have my eyes looked at and coming into TSA territory, approaching the magnetometer, I waited for the agent to point at my shoes and yell, “Are you over seventy-five?” and give me the pleasure of saying, “Thank you very much. I’m eighty-two.” Simple vanity on my part. But she didn’t and it struck me as an insult, the assumption that elderly people are incapable of acts of terrorism using explosive footwear. I’m no engineer but I think that by googling “incendiary soles” I could figure out a way to make my sneakers deadly.

But now it seems TSA has changed its procedures and those of us with medical implants such as my pacemaker/defibrillator must be patted down by an agent, and so I was and it made me feel important again, a potential threat to national security. I’m not a convicted felon like Whatsisname but I like to imagine I have felonious potential and being patted down by a man with a badge came as a distinct honor. A person incapable of causing trouble is ready to be packed off to Shady Acres to sit at a table and do jigsaw puzzles.

The agent put on blue plastic gloves so as not to pick up any lethal germs from my clothing and he patted me down with the backs of his hands, first front, then back, from top to bottom, and he instructed me to part my legs so that he could pat me down there, which reminded me of my old pal Arnie Goldman who married Pat, an Australian, and whose Army sergeant said, “Nothing makes the privates so happy as a pat from down under.” Arnie was a college pal and he died years ago and I remember him with pleasure. But I also think about what sort of crime I might commit.

I’m nobody who’d be intending to blow up a plane or demand that it fly me to Iran. No, I’d only hijack a plane so I could grab a microphone and lead the passengers in song. In my old age I’ve become passionate about the emotional benefits of group song. I feel that my generation is the last who know the words to great songs and when we’ve departed the planet, nobody will sing “Auld Lang Syne” or “America the Beautiful” or even “Happy Birthday to You,” they’ll just switch on Google Choir and hold up their phones and fifty phones will sing “God Bless America” in unison.

I love the old Republican hymn from back when the party was dedicated to liberating Black slaves from a lifetime of humiliation and drudgery in the cotton fields, and now and then I find an audience that knows the words, including “the watchfires of a hundred circling camps” and “evening dews and damps” and “the dim and flaring lamps,” and when a thousand mature Americans raise their voices together about the truth marching on, it gives you hope that indeed truth is on the march and facts matter and certain people did say what they said even if they now deny it. Journalism that aims for honesty is a foundation rock in a democracy and those who denigrate it need to have a flaring lamp stuck up their rear end.

Back in the Sixties we sang “We Shall Overcome” and of course we didn’t overcome, as we realize now; a New York real-estate developer came along who represents every single thing we ever set out to overcome and he is riding high on his water buffalo, but there is still hope.

I write this sitting in the waiting room of an ophthalmology clinic in Minnesota, listening to the screams of a terrified child as a nurse puts drops in his eyes. It tears at your heart. I pray that the boy will use his eyesight to accomplish great things, art, science, literature. I pray for the schizophrenic granddaughter of my dear friend who died last week, that God comfort her and grant her a good life in this beautiful world. I pray for Kamala and her joyful campaign crisscrossing the blessed country. And I pray for her opponent, that the bone spurs that exempted him from the draft spur him in a miraculous moment to tell the truth and confess his sins, his hundreds of thousands of lies, and spare the nation four years of unnecessary suffering. Thank you, Lord. And put this confession on YouTube so we can watch it over and over and over.

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