Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 14

The astonishment of mornings on the river last week

I spent my mornings last week at a little white house with a porch overlooking the Connecticut River, astonished by the early morning light, the devout silence except for the twittering of exhilarated birds, and the longer I sat there without opening my phone or laptop, I felt the prospects of the day getting better and better. This is the benefit of going to bed early. It causes concern among others — Is he sick? Was he offended? — but I rise at five and tiptoe downstairs and am dazed by wonder, which is a good thing for a man in the business of humoristicism. Comedy is about incongruity and dissonance and irony but morning light makes a person grateful for the natural world, for quiet and coffee and for the love and friendship of the slumberers upstairs.

It’s a revelation of delight, of our Creator’s delight in His creation, and though we’re brought up to be skeptical, wary of big hopes, prepared to deal with the injustices of life, still the dawn light argues with stoicism and you see the beauty of the ordinary. And then a distant leaf blower starts up, an angry drone like an air raid siren and we’re back in comedy. What was wrong with the old-fashioned hand-operated rake? Why does anyone need this monster that puts you in mind of the German Luftwaffe, the electric chair, the cruel dentistry of my youth?

But eventually it goes away. This is true of most aggravations. The ones that don’t go away we can escape by coming to a little white house on the river. My wife’s ancestors came here from New Jersey to escape the summer heat, but now, with air-conditioning, we come to escape noise

Being a professional entertainer means I am obliged to amuse my family. Someone reads the front page of the paper and is incredulous about some Prominent Person and says, “I just cannot believe that — blah blah blah” and I say, “So —.” (I’m from Minnesota so I begin every joke with “So.”) “So a Unitarian lifesaver was on duty at the lake where Jesus walked on water to rescue a ship and the lifeguard told his friends, ‘Can you believe it? The guy says he’s the Son of God and he can’t even swim.’” When they ask for a joke, I try to have one ready. For little kids: “Why do gorillas have big fingers? Because they have big nostrils.” Or “What is the problem with living on M Street? You have to go three blocks to P.” I love dumb jokes, the profundity of them. “Did you hear about the dyslexic man who walked into a bra?” There is a wealth of Man Walked Into A Bar jokes, all of them good, plus Dog Walked Into A Bar, and Pickle Walked Into A Bar. The bartender said, “What are you doing here? You’re only a pickle.” The pickle said, “I’m celebrating the fact that I can walk. Give me a drink.” So the bartender made him a Manhattan with a little leaf in the middle. The pickle said, “What’s that?” The bartender said, “Central Park.”

I tell jokes because I remember a time in my life when I crowded into a booth at a bar with eight other guys and some guys leaning over us and we told jokes and now I don’t see people doing that anymore. It’s a guy responsibility — women are worriers, men are kidders — and I remember one afternoon, over rounds of beer and bumps, that we told 75 different How Many Whatsis Does It Take To Change A Light Bulb jokes — we kept a list (Irishmen, therapists, optimists, agnostics, Russians, English majors) and all of them were reasonably funny. No more.

So naturally I wonder if AA and rehab and treatment centers are responsible for the disappearance of the joke circle, and instead of pickles walking into a bar, we have a circle of men on folding chairs talking about their emotionally distant fathers who failed to validate them. So a man talked about his father who was a magician who cut people in half. “Did he work in a carnival or circus?” “No, he worked from home. I have a half-brother and a half-sister.”

But it was my abandonment of alcohol twenty years ago that made early morning beautiful again. So it takes just one therapist to change a light bulb but the light bulb has to really want to change. And the difference between an Irish wedding and an Irish funeral is that at the funeral there’s one less drunk. That’s me. Have a nice day.

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You never know, so it’s good to pay attention

I am a man in a bubble, walking the streets of New York, taking short views, smelling the flowers and the fragrance of hot dogs, leaving it to others to deal with the planet, the nation, the cognitive dissonance of everyday life, the media conspiracy to cover up the prophecies contained in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and I simply watch out for bicycles and scooters. They are treacherous, ridden by libertarians who recognize no traffic laws. I cross the street on the Walk sign and an e-bike zooms silently past and through the red light without a “Sorry” or “Excuse me,” and they are so agile, changing lanes, racing through narrow passages in traffic jams, they appear out of nowhere, inches away, and the man on foot is a sitting duck.

I’ve had a long interesting life and I’d like my obituary to take note of it. I don’t want the most memorable line to be “Keillor was killed by a motor scooter racing down Amsterdam Avenue to deliver three platters of crudités for an LGBTQRST fundraiser at Symphony Space.”

Life, as we all know, can change in an instant. Let me tell you a true story. The husband of a friend of ours was riding his bike to the vet’s to pick up a prescription for his dog when, cruising down an avenue in Queens, he was struck by a car making a right turn on the red light (illegal in New York, but the driver was a young guy from Maryland). The cops came. The husband, lying unconscious in the street, was taken to the hospital. The driver lied to the police and said the bicyclist ran into him. He returned to Maryland, untagged. The husband’s leg was badly injured and after surgery he was hospitalized for five days. His daughter went to the police and pointed out the mistake in the police report. The police shrugged.

The false police report may mean that their health insurer will balk at the bill and a lawyer may be required to bring the jerk from Maryland to court and point out that the rear wheel of the bicycle was crushed and that the bicycle cannot be ridden backward. The outcome should be that the liar is held responsible for pain and suffering and legal fees and replacement of the bicycle.

But where do you find a lawyer willing to take the case? The new Yale Law graduate wants to take on big meaningful cases about environmental issues, women’s rights, free speech, not a bike accident. And everyone knows that the N.Y.P.D., like any other bureaucracy, can protect itself by engaging in procedural detours and minutiae that would drive even a saint to despair. And the number of saintly lawyers is limited.

Life is precarious. So be watchful, look both ways, and if you’re inspired to think large poetic thoughts, go to a park, don’t think them while crossing a street.

An old man knows about precariousness. I’ve fallen several times in Manhattan, unexpectedly, and I’m 6’3” so it’s a long way down, and each time, within four seconds, five people were standing over me, reaching down, asking, “Are you okay?” Not because I am a published author and a stand-up comedian, but because I am a human being. Nobody reached for my billfold to make sure of my citizenship.

I went to the Minnesota State Fair in 1963 and saw Buster Keaton’s name listed on the afternoon variety show at the Grandstand and bought a ticket. I loved his movie stunts, the solemn face and the porkpie hat, Buster running from the cops and grabbing the railing of a speeding streetcar and being yanked to safety, Buster standing in the street as the wall of a house falls and an open window falls on him and he is untouched, Buster ducking under the two cops approaching with their nightsticks and they take a swing and knock each other out. He was almost 70 when I saw him at the Fair, working with a stepladder and a stooge carrying a plank and absent-mindedly turning and whacking Buster, and the perfection of it stuck with me, the great dignity of the victim, the gracefulness of the tumble. Buster could’ve done the bicycle stunt but the car would’ve been a convertible and when it hit the bike, Buster would grab an awning and swing and land on the driver’s shoulders, snatch his gold pocketwatch, and do a backflip onto the bike and turn sharp left. Everyone likes a happy ending.

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A father speaks, after the day has passed

The third Sunday of June is Father’s Day and if you forgot, that’s okay, we fathers don’t expect to be celebrated, we only want to be forgiven. Our contribution to creation is rather small, some necking and a few minutes of pleasure, then we fall asleep and it’s the mother who provides room and board for nine months and pushes them down the chute and does most of the worrying. So Mother’s Day in May is a major occasion while Daddy Day is often overshadowed by National Nanny Day and Cleaning Lady Day.

The most prolific father of all time was surely Solomon, who, according to Scripture, had 700 wives and 300 concubines, which would certainly keep a man well-occupied on evenings and weekends. Just remembering their names and birthdays would take a concerted effort. And if the Song of Solomon is any indication (“How beautiful and pleasant you are, O loved one, with all your delights! How much better is your love than wine, and the fragrance of your oils than any spice!”) he was quite enthusiastic in the bedroom. So it’s reasonable to assume he fathered thousands of kids.

But in his Book of Proverbs, Solomon is not so euphoric. Fatherhood weighs on him. He says, “My son, if sinners entice thee, consent thou not. Walk not thou in the way with them.” It’s a long way from “the fragrance of your oils” to “consent thou not.” This is a father talking. Don’t hang out with jerks. Nothing good happens after midnight. I don’t want to hear that kind of language around here.

Fatherhood hasn’t changed much since then. You’re enjoying a fragrant woman and the next thing you know, your daughter comes downstairs in a translucent blouse. Yikes!

And when we come to Solomon’s Book of Ecclesiastes, we find a rather weary man, not the same guy who was sniffing his naked wife and smelling cinnamon: “The thing that has been is the thing that shall be … there is nothing new under the sun.”

Well, I’ve felt that way myself: suddenly one day you realize you’re tired of sausage pizza and you wouldn’t care if you never saw another toasted bagel in your life — even the root beer float has lost its appeal. I have to admit that I will never like Debussy, will never read Moby-Dick.

Solomon lived twenty-five hundred years before we Protestants came along. We believed that we were something totally new and astonishing, we were the Enlightenment, we brought in science, we saw that the sun was the center of the solar system, not the Earth, and we did away with superstition and papal infallibility and the divine right of kings and we brought in democratic principles, carbonated beverages, analgesics, baseball, Abstract Expressionism, cheeseburgers, and Google, but when you google Solomon you’ll find, “Whoever increases knowledge increases sorrow.” So much for the laptop computer and the cellphone.

“Cast your bread upon the waters and you shall find it after many days,” he said. Does anyone understand that? Who wants soggy bread?

In the Advent story, Joseph is a mere bystander, off to the side of the B.V.M. There is no B.V.J. in the story, just a carpenter, a handyman. When Jesus grew up, he gathered twelve single men around him. There is no evidence that any one of his disciples ever was attracted to the spiciness of a naked woman.

I’ve known some great fathers, my brother Philip for one, my nephews Will and Douglas, my friends Mark and Tony and Sandy and Fred. Patience is one of their virtues, optimism, a willingness to look the other way: in other words, a sense of humor. Had I been a postal clerk or a plumber, I’d’ve maybe been a better father but I got engrossed in show business and for a few years was fairly popular and was gone a lot and they grew up fatherless. They have done pretty well on their own, all three of them, and I claim no credit. It is what it is. But when the National Fatherhood League gathers for its annual banquet and the bestowing of the Papa awards, include me out. Same with Uncles’ Day and Cousins’. But I am working on being better at husbanding, and I think she notices: I get near her and smell sandalwood and chamomile oil and that stuff goes for thousands per ounce. I must be doing something right.

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I’m fine, thank you, and how goes it with you?

I spent most of last week at the Mayo Clinic back home in Minnesota, one of the friendliest places I know of, where I peed in a cup, turned my head to the side and coughed, had my eyes dilated and looked at the ophthalmologist’s right ear as she shone brilliant lights into my eyes, stripped to my shorts to be examined by a dermatologist, took a deep breath and held it while a doctor listened to my heart, was X-rayed, had electric shocks transmitted to various leg and arm muscles, and had my arm pierced and several vials of blood drawn by a man from Baghdad who came to this country at age 22 with no English whatsoever and I admired his perfect diction as he told me his story. I am not a hypochondriac so I know very little about medicine; what I love about Mayo is the humanity of it, the cheerfulness of the men and women in blue who call you from the waiting room to the warren of examining rooms. Their gentleness with the halt and the lame. The good humor. I sit in the examining chair and the ophthalmic nurse says, “I want you to follow my finger with your eyes,” and I say, That’s not your finger, it’s your thumb.” And she laughs.

I am a lucky man. Mayo has kept me alive. When I set out to be a writer, I felt obligated to smoke several packs a day and become a serious drinker, both of which I gave up long ago, but I still love cheeseburgers, so it’s a wonder to find that my cholesterol is low. My idea of exercise is walking fast in airline terminals and not using the moving sidewalks. So I’m touched to look at the echocardiogram screen and see my heart working, including the valve from a pig that a Mayo surgeon installed to replace one of mine. Its little petals flutter in stupendous synchronicity.

The clientele here includes a lot of Minnesotans my age and as I walk down the hall I see someone stop and stare at me and try to remember my name and sometimes they walk up and say, “Are you ––?” and I say, “I’m trying to be” and we talk. They know me because I was a friend of Chet Atkins and I knew Leo Kottke. I once sang “Hard Times Come Again No More” with Renée Fleming. I have hung around with famous people.

So a woman walks up and says, “Don’t I know you?” and she remembers me reciting the 87 counties of Minnesota in alphabetical order so I do it for her. I meet a man from St. Paul who fell off a 25-foot ladder but is still trying to play guitar like Leo Kottke: his ambition for thirty years has been to play “Vaseline Machine Gun” and he’s still working on “Crow River Waltz.” I meet a woman in a wheelchair who’s had some neurological adventures but is on the mend and planning to go back southwest and resume teaching Navajo children, which clearly, from the expression on her face, is her life and her joy. I sit in the waiting room and turn to the man next to me and ask, “Where you come in from?” He’s from Bozeman so we talk about the precarious business of ranching. Mortality draws us together. Nobody asks me, “What you in here for?” but we’re all vulnerable, sickness and trouble are a great equalizer of people, which makes the everyday more beautiful. A former CEO of a huge corporation sits in a wheelchair and what brightens his face is the fact that his daughter is flying in from L.A. to have lunch with him in an hour.

People come to Mayo from all over because there are great minds here, but what touches me is the steady cheerfulness of the place. The man who stands at the front door whose job it is to say, “Good morning.” The kindness. You sit in an examining room and the doctor always knocks before entering. Your eyes meet. A handshake. Before your file opens on the computer and the test results are studied, here is your chance to recite your troubles to the sympathetic ear of silence. Each one is worthy. God loves each one. Life is good and that’s why we want more of it.

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A round table in downtown St. Paul Friday night

The rule is “Only buy oysters on the half-shell in months with an R in them,” but I took some relatives to dinner Friday and shelled out fifty bucks for a dozen shells of not much, which is truly dumb for a man my age. But it gave me the chance to quote Mark Twain to a great-niece sitting next to me at the restaurant, a smart sixth-grader: “Good judgment is the result of experience and experience the result of poor judgment,” and she laughed. She’d never heard of Mark Twain. Which gave me the chance to quote some more of him: “To do good is noble. To tell others to do good is even nobler and much less trouble.” And “Don’t let your education get in the way of your learning. I was educated once and it took me years to get over it.” I’ll bet she went home and googled him and read a hundred more quotes and learned something invaluable about sentence structure, and long after I am gone into the sunset I will have helped bestow a fine humorist upon the world. Which is a noble thing and all the result of poor judgment.

It was a beautiful dinner, the best I’ve been at in months, nine of us relatives around a table in downtown St. Paul, and four of us were teenagers, which taught me I’ve been spending much too much time with people my own age, and when I do, the conversation devolves to a low point — inevitably, just as if you eat dinner with four other plumbers you’re likely to wind up discussing interesting toilet problems, when I eat with old people we wind up talking about Mr. Mirage-of-Long-Ago, but Friday evening his name never came up. Not once. The closest was when I said I do my best writing before dawn.

The tenth-grader on my left talked about her sport, swimming — she does the 100-yard butterfly — and about friendship, which being on a swim team leads to, and about playing violin and places she wants to see and things she hopes to do, and the sixth-grader talked about gardening and playing cello and car trips and she laughed at many of my jokes. I quoted her a limerick of mine about the old lady of Vancouver who drank two quarts of varnish remover and didn’t get ill or vomit but still it didn’t do much to improve her. I don’t think she’d heard a limerick before so I wrote one for her:

In Scripture it says when one meeteth

Another and stoppeth and greeteth,

In so addressing

One bestoweth a blessing,

And so I say, “God bless you, Edith.”

It’s a rare reverse limerick and I’m proud of it so I wrote it on a card and gave it to her.

It was so much fun. We were at a hotel a stone’s throw from a storefront theater where I started doing a Saturday night radio show. The Mississippi was a couple blocks away and a few miles upstream, back in 1960, was an enormous parking lot where I, a college student, worked five mornings a week parking cars. It was a gravel lot for about 500 cars, with no painted lines. The traffic all came in a rush around 7:30 and my job was to direct them into double rows in straight lines, and to get the job done right I had to adopt the persona of a Nazi storm trooper, crushing free will. Democracy led to chaos, so for an hour every morning, I transformed myself into a fuehrer, which means I can appreciate what Mr. Mirage Ago has accomplished, bringing the Republican Party to heel using the same techniques I employed in the parking lot: the stone face, no kidding around, My Way or the Highway, Death To The Disloyal and All the Human Vermin and Scum who ignore me.

It’s an amazing feat, turning the party of rectitude and personal liberty into a unified body of citizens totally devoted to one man, obedient to his self-absorption. He is down on the country, has never praised his wife or intentionally said anything funny, has never hugged a small child in public. But it was so good of these young people to give their old great-uncle a big burst of faith in America’s future. I can’t wait to see them again. If we lowered the voting age to 12 and required voters over 60 to pass a history exam, I believe it’d be a big step forward.

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The bag may not inflate but oxygen is flowing

I went out to Colorado on Wednesday, a state I love because my great-great-grandfather David Powell went there in 1863, perhaps for the silver rush but maybe to avoid dying in the Civil War, which, if he had done the noble thing, might’ve eliminated the possibility of me. As Mark Twain said, “To do good is noble. To tell others to do good is even nobler and much less trouble.” I would’ve gone to Denver to research David’s papers — he served in the first legislature — but I had to go to Loveland. I am one of America’s few remaining octogenarian stand-ups and I was booked to stand up and do a show.

I see now that I got into this line of work when I was small, and a neighbor child informed me that I had been left on my parents’ doorstep by gypsies, along with a note, “We will return for him soon,” which he told me with such certainty that I was on the lookout for gypsies, but there were none in rural Minnesota at that time so I forgot about it. Except you don’t, really. Soon after, my mother was large with twin boys, which was all quite real and remarkable and one day in March she went to the hospital and two days later returned home with them. Nothing was said about the inception of the two and no questions were asked. I don’t recall any sex education in school. I figured it out myself from a book I found in my mother’s dresser drawer, Light On Dark Corners, which explained sexual intercourse in rather flowery terms, like you’d describe ballet or raising hydrangeas, but I got the point. But the seed of my own oddness was planted and as the two boys grew into serious responsible scholars, I took up poetry, then fiction and showbiz, and now find myself in the gypsy life of an itinerant octogenarian stand-up. My true talent is farming, I’m sure, but a child told me I was an alien drop-off and I’m still living this idea. I had to leave town because Minnesota is a Scandinavian culture and observes the Jante law, “Don’t think you’re somebody” and you are known for the dumbest thing about you — back home I am still known as Boomer because in high school gym class I was wrestling a kid and he had me locked in a takedown and I strained so hard I let the loudest fart they’d ever heard. So I had to leave town or live the rest of my life with that name. And once you leave home, you are free to pursue a career in comedy.

I boarded a plane to Denver at LaGuardia and when the flight attendant instructed us to put our cellphones on Airplane Mode, I was engrossed in something else and somewhere over the Alleghenies my phone vibrated and the plane bounced and rolled to the left and dove, rocking side to side, alarms howling in the cockpit. Oxygen masks dropped down, women screamed, the flight attendants went white as sheets and the guy next to me who’d been looking at coital activity on his laptop yelled, “Jesus, I accept you! Take me, Lord! I am yours!” and then the woman on my right grabbed the phone out of my jacket pocket and switched it to Airplane Mode. The plane leveled itself, the masks swooshed back up, people resumed breathing. The captain came out and people pointed at me: I handed him my phone. The back of my neck got red, I could feel people staring at me, the terrorist. I could feel moral revulsion. But I was a big hit in Loveland.

I’m a historic guy. They could put me in a museum. I went to college when tuition was $71/quarter so we didn’t have to ask our parents for money so we got to go into the arts. There were no laptops, no iPhones, no Airplane Mode. I regaled the Lovelanders with stories about the Fifties, back when Minnesota winters were ferocious. I lived through the bitter winter of 1948 when the temp got down to minus 70 and many of us Minnesotans became comatose, our metabolism stopped, there was no neurological response, and a month later I awoke in a narrow wooden box wearing makeup, which I’d never worn before. It was interesting. I should’ve dressed more warmly but as someone said, “Good judgment comes from experience and much experience comes from bad judgment.” And thanks to my mistake I have experienced the afterlife and I told them about it in Loveland. Someday I’ll come to your town and tell you.

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Open the doors, let the young mingle among the treasures

A glorious Friday night at the Met Museum in New York, the great halls packed with thousands of teenagers for Teen Night, admission is whatever you care to drop in the box, a couple bucks, the change in your pocket, high school kids mobbing the joint, the Picasso lady, the naked Venus, the Rodin folks, a 15th-century lady, the naked man with a sword, all looking down on rivers of youthful energy, and a teen gospel choir sings in one marble stairway and a brass jazz band plays in another and a dance troupe from India performs in a gallery — everywhere you look, something is happening. There is no dress code, nobody lecturing us on what this naked man’s nakedness means. It’s not the silent sacred temple it usually is; the kids are mingling, searching, scouting, sitting on the floors, jabbering, holding their cell phones high to take videos, the place is electric with youth. The guards, of course, are a little edgy, but I don’t see any lurking or skulking, just an incredible lightheartedness. My sweetheart is fascinated by the dancers, their ornate costumes, their quickness and balance, the chanting and drumming. I feel drunk on the happiness of the urban young amid all the antiquities. I am an antiquity myself and I realize the Met’s goal is to broaden its base by creating joy where there had only been awesomeness, but walking through the building makes me incredibly happy about the future of the country and the world. It just plain does.

I’m an old Democrat; I am descended from worriers. On this Friday I’ve read disturbing news, I’ve had long phone conversations about the unreality of American politics, about creeping antisemitism, the long shadow of authoritarianism, the health problems of old pals, but walking into the Met has blown all that away and I haven’t even looked at a Rothko or the van Gogh “Irises” — it’s simply the exuberance of youth.

It’s all the more powerful after weeks of the trial at the courthouse downtown of the Most Famous Living New Yorker, a 77-year-old conman from Queens, a humorless huckster who’s seldom seen smiling, only grimacing, and who’s never hugged a small child or petted a dog or embraced his wife or told a joke, whose campaign platform is simply, “The country is going to hell and only I can save it.”

Some of these kids at the Met will wind up in law school and get a serious education in civil procedure and come away with due respect for our system of justice: trial by a jury of one’s peers, the rules of evidence, witnesses testifying under oath aware of the penalty for perjury. The lawyers defending the Famous Man were so taught and they stand silently by his side as he bellows his contempt to the TV cameras.

I admire the twelve Manhattanites who made the daily trek, probably by subway, to the courthouse on Centre Street and walked in anonymity through the crowds of curious waiting to get a glimpse of Mr. Big. Each of the twelve, plus the alternate jurors, made their way to a back entrance to rendezvous with a court official and a couple of cops to be escorted upstairs to a dismal waiting room to sit and drink bad coffee until called to the courtroom. Each of them must have devoutly wished, in the course of the six weeks, that he or she could be rescued from this morass of haggling and droning and resume normal life. Each person who made it through the initial screening was obligated to serve — no excuses — and was paid $40 per day, no reimbursement for transportation, and was sworn to judge the facts according to the evidence, without prejudice or sympathy, following the rules of law as explained by the judge.

The U.S. Senate twice failed to faithfully consider far more serious charges against this man. Between the solemnity of the courtroom and the carnival of politics, there is a vast gap. Our system of laws is basic to our way of life. You and I are aware of this every day of our lives. But millions of our fellow Americans have bought into falsehood, that the 2020 election was stolen.

Teen Night at the Met was a holiday from all that. The young people there wouldn’t have elected the Scowler to be a municipal sewage inspector. There are dark days ahead but eventually the young and curious and lighthearted are going to inherit the country and make it great and an artist will make a sculpture of Trump naked with a sword, his bare butt and belly hanging out, and that will be that.

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A nation under threat, a man incapable of action

I live in a New York doorman building where, I hear, a doorman has been asked by a resident to change the battery in her cell phone and by another resident to unscrew a peanut butter jar lid; both women were college graduates, both married, the first to an author, the second to a man who lectures on leadership to business groups. What this tells me, people, is that we are being overtaken by China in basic skills, and one day we’ll discover that crucial highly specialized technicians have abandoned their careers and gone into songwriting and storytelling or have opened summer camps for gifted children and that the maintenance of our nuclear arsenal has been put out for bids and that Chinese restaurants in Nebraska have been getting enormous orders for Szechuan takeout from the United States Strategic Command.

I don’t know that Joe Biden can deal with this. The Oval Office is assisted living at its utmost: the Army Signal Corps maintains the cell phones, the Secret Service unscrews tight lids, and the memo warning of the level of Chinese cable TV viewership in and around U.S. missile installations is probably on the desk of an attaché in the basement of the West Wing Annex. The ubiquity of chopsticks, the Chinese ornamentation on the Golden Arches, the addition of McWontons and McNoodles to the menu: all have gone without comment by the President.

This is the problem with a free society, which ours is: people are allowed to pursue their own whims and wishes regardless of the national interest. I, for example, pursued a career in comic fiction when America had twice as many humorists as it needed and we ridiculed national leaders, the military, law enforcement, all forms of authority, the very idea of patriotism, even the sacred institution of marriage. Our nation is under threat from insidious forces and here I am writing humorously about it. This is not good.

But one fact leaps out: Republicans won by a landslide in 2020 only to have the election stolen from them, and which totalitarian nation has the wherewithal to fill out millions of fake ballots and ship them from Shanghai to stuff ballot boxes and elect Joe? It’s the first time a foreign country has elected a President. They did it because they know the Republicans are more likely to go after Chinese agents who’ve undergone eyelid surgery and who carry the AI backpacks with headphones that provide aliens with appropriate American slang, e.g., “that dog don’t hunt” or “let’s run it up the flagpole and see who salutes” or “phony as a three-dollar bill.”

Joe Biden is a good guy but he has not defended our borders. Everywhere I look I see un-American activities. Soccer, for example. In many communities, football is being driven out by a chaotic sport of players in shorts running around in circles, kicking a ball, not carrying it. And rock climbing — where did this come from? Young people forsaking the fine structure of baseball and basketball for the pointless exercise of ascending a precipice. Our churches have been corrupted by pop music and creeping romanticism. I go into cafes and see tart instead of apple pie, no Jell-O, no tuna hotdish or mac and cheese. I know teenagers who don’t know the words to our national anthem, have never sung “My country, ’tis of thee” or “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.”

Joe would make a good mayor of Wilmington but maybe the nation needs a Great Leader. We haven’t had one since FDR. Today’s Democrats are not into Greatness, they piddle around with programs. I keep thinking, “What if Hillary back in 2016 had said she liked to grab men by the crotch and broken through her image as a 7th grade civics teacher? She would’ve won, even against the shiploads of votes from China.”

I love my building and its doormen. I pull up in a cab and a doorman grabs my suitcase and wheels it in, another doorman calls the elevator. I order Chinese food to be delivered and a doorman brings it to my door. I really need to break out of this comfortable life and walk out the door without a phone or billfold or my medications and stick out my thumb and try to make it back to Minnesota, sleeping in ditches, knocking on doors and begging for food, shoplifting in grocery stores. I’m an old man and I’ve missed out on this basic survival experience. I keep telling myself, “You’ve got to do this,” but for some reason I don’t listen.

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I rise to testify in my own defense

I spent 12 hours in a New York ER last Saturday and upon discharge was given ten pages of test results and now I have more information about myself than I know what to do with. I went into the ER on my own steam, by taxi, no siren, because I had experienced a few surprising memory lapses (name of principal physician, name of building I reside in, what I did the previous week), blanks that a few minutes of research could’ve filled in, but my love was alarmed so I left the West Side where the novelists live and went to the East Side where the neurologists practice, where they put me through CT, MRI, had me follow their finger with my eyes, and now I’m feeling fine, thank you, but now I must look at long diagnoses of lobes and fissures, global this and that, and the word “transient” bothers me. I know they don’t mean it this way but I imagine myself with baggy pants, holes in my shoes, holding a wine bottle, the kind with a screw top, and I don’t drink.

There was no intracranial hemorrhage, praise the Lord, and I do wish that a neurologist or a physician’s assistant had written “patient was focused and well-spoken and presented a chronic sardonic sense of incongruities that brought care providers to the verge of amusement,” but I will take what I can get, which was discharge and a cab ride home.

“For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow,” said King Solomon in the Book of Ecclesiastes, and that was even before neurology came along to put more salt in the soup. It is a dark book, Ecclesiastes (“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity…. there is nothing new under the sun.”), and so we skipped it in Sunday School in favor of Jesus gathering the little children into His lap and saying, “Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven,” thus putting His stamp of approval on immaturity.

Ecclesiastes is not a book for a man my age to be reading, all about the meaninglessness of life and how your hard labor is in vain: I believed in the meaninglessness of labor back in my teens and twenties and then found a vocation and have been happier ever since. I much prefer the Song of Solomon, the bosomy passages, the banqueting, the beloved and all her delights, I’d walk a million miles for one of her smiles, she’s the jam on my toast, the one I love most, so help me, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

You can’t tell me the guy who wrote “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” was the same guy who wrote, “Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm, for love is strong as death, jealousy is fierce as the grave.” And indeed I look in Wikipedia where they say it weren’t so, that Solomon was tenth century B.C. and the book came out seven centuries later. I will leave this to Jewish scholars. We Christians don’t buy into meaninglessness; we believe we are candles in dark corners, some brighter than others.

I once wrote good obituaries for the St. Paul paper and I like to think that some of them were pasted in scrapbooks and now a teenager is reading them with interest, learning more about great-great-grandpa Al. I once did an early morning radio show and provided cheerfulness to grad students coming off three hours of sleep to go to the 8 a.m. seminar who then went on to fine careers in botany and biology.

I did a live show on Saturdays at 5 p.m., which many young couples came to on their first date, their parents being fans of mine let them borrow the car, so it was a safe date, better than ingesting unlabeled drugs on the riverbank and skinny-dipping while semi-conscious, and those couples were bored to tears by my nonsense but those marriages have now extended into happy grandparenting and I take some credit. I dare say my couples turned out better than George Carlin couples or Black Sabbath couples or couples who jumped straight in the backseat and were parents before they could vote. I did what I could for my team. I ran the race though I walked the last couple of miles. I left the faith or thought I did but the faith didn’t leave me. I married Jenny and she loves me even in my current condition. The defense rests.

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THEY WERE SO YOUNG

Memorial Day and the old folks come
And stand in the sun feeling sad and dumb.
The boys in the ground—there are so many,
They’re eighteen, nineteen, maybe twenty—

They just moved out of a boy’s bedroom
And went to war, now they lie in a tomb
Old people come on Memorial Day
And people speak but what’s there to say?
The dead would trade it all for the chance
To find a girl and ask her to dance.

Ticonderoga, Hamburger Hill,
Young men marching out to kill.
Manassas, Shiloh, Chancellorsville,
They fell down and they lie there still.

World War I: they picked up their arms
And marched to Ypres and the Battle of the Marne
Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele, the Somme,
Midwestern boys far from home.
On ninety acres near Ardennes
Five thousand 162 men
Who left the U.S.A. to strike
Down the wickedness of the Third Reich.

Eight thousand near Henri-Chapelle,
Outside London, in northern France,
Lie men who served their country well
And fought to liberate foreign lands.
On land and sea, in the air they fought,
Landed in France, advanced to the Rhine,
Ferocious battles along the line.
In a terrifying moment, died
And now they lie in a narrow lot,
Head to foot and side by side

Far from Ohio, New York, P.A.
And now their families are fading away,
And memories fade,
And how many visitors come around
To visit this or that burial ground?

So on one day at the end of May
We pause and think of what we owe
To those who lie here row after row
Who fought for freedom long ago.

Iwo Jima and Normandy,
Anzio and the Coral Sea,
The Battle of the Bulge, the Korean War,
Pork Chop Hill, the Chosin Reservoir,
Loc Ninh, Dak To, the siege of Khe Sanh,
The Tet Offensive and the battle of Saigon:
Young men running and young men fall,
Their names are inscribed on a long stone wall.

Iraq, Afghanistan, again and again,
The story repeated of elderly men
Wary of appearing weak,
Needing heroic lines to speak,
Sent the soldiers out to die,
Leaving the mothers and sisters to cry.

Tragic mistakes were made, it’s true.
Generals sent young men to do
What shouldn’t be done,
What couldn’t be won.
At a terrible cost,
The mission failed, young men were lost.

History will not ignore
The screw-ups that are a part of war.
Presidents, senators, leaders will be
Closely examined by history,

And on 9/11 in the terrible hours
When the fires burned in the twin towers
Men and women of the emergency force
Came racing through the downtown streets,
Cops and firemen and EMTs
Dragged equipment through the doors
And headed for the upper floors.
Knowing this was no accident.
Up the smoky stairs they went
With every reason to assume
That this building would be their tomb.
And those who suffered and fell will be heard,
And history will have the last word.

But all we say on Memorial Day
As bells are rung, hymns are sung,
Flowers are brought and strewed among
The stones and crosses in this yard,
The graves of those who did their part.
All we say is, it breaks your heart:
They were so young.
They were so young.
They were so young.
They missed out on so many years

So after you decorate the grave,
After the speeches and the tears,
Enjoy this land they died to save.
Enjoy your life, see your friends,

Put the hamburgers on the grill,
Toss a salad, eat your fill,
Let the festivity commence,
Take a walk, go for a run,
Let jokes be told and songs be sung,
Do the things they would’ve done,
Those who died too young.

Copyright 2024 Garrison Keillor

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