Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 16

Spring is here, time to get to know each other

School choice — the right of parents to get state subsidy of the private education of their kids — was not around back in my time, my dears. Rich people could send their heirs to Foxcroft to be taught table manners and a privileged accent and the rest of us got on the bus and went to P.S. 101 and learned to scrap for what we wanted. We got mac and cheese for lunch and the rich kids got pasta à la fromage, so we learned to accept our lot while many rich kids wound up in expensive psychiatric retreats weeping about their narcissist parents who left them in the care of cruel nannies. I feel lucky to have avoided that.

And now conservatives fear their children coming under the influence of liberal teachers and being taught bad things about colonialism — and progressive parents want their kids to avoid football culture and the teaching of aggression and want to send Prairie and Sierra to Chamomile Academy where parents sit in the bleachers watching soccer games and shouting “Be gentle!” and “Respect each other’s differences!”

Myself, I have a bias in favor of public education because that was my experience. I came from very exclusive fundamentalist evangelicals who looked down on Methodists and Lutherans as Scripturally off-base, so when I left home and walked into public school, I found myself among — O my gosh! — Catholic kids, boys who took the Lord’s name in vain and told dirty jokes, girls who hung out with those boys. A nice Christian boy felt rather lonely at times.

But when it came to my own kids and grandkids, I remember the basketball coach who also taught geography and who’d never been anywhere and the planet held no interest for him. He assigned us to read the outdated geography textbooks as he perused the newspaper sports section. What a pitiful schlump he was. I’d pay money so my progeny could avoid him.

It’s a beautiful world, this Creation, and our kids have a God-given right to be awakened to it and a light switched on in their brains.

That is the great gift of May in the North, when we slip out of our cloistered lives and sit outdoors and look at each other. In winter, we read the news and complain about the cruelties of the world, but in good weather we can perch like poultry in a farmyard and observe our democratic civilization.

This is a beautiful feature of Manhattan, the proliferation of squares and plazas for people to perch or promenade in and escape from regimentation and the tyranny of social media. I pity the tourists who flood into Times Square, aka Garish Ten-Story Video Billboard National Park, a tourist concentration camp where people from mid-America are pestered by panhandlers in superhero costumes and acquire a lifelong loathing of the city, whereas if they walked south to Madison Square on 23rd Street and sat and looked up at the handsome 1902 Flatiron Building, they’d learn something about the city. You sit on a bench and people pass and if they pause, you can talk to them. It’s the theater of democracy, and it’s very civil. Nobody has posted a sign here, Your considerate behavior is appreciated, politeness is enforced by the power of the New York Stare and maybe a muttered “Get over yourself.” Back in the Midwest we lack that sarcastic stare; you step on our foot, we say, “Excuse me.” And there’s not dependable public transportation, just 16-lane freeways. So our plazas are deserted.

Social media can be ugly; mania thrives in the dark, rats and hairy tarantulas live inside your laptop. Yes, there’re billions of bytes of info, but we need the up-close for our own humanity. Face-to-face decency is at the heart of democracy. We need to talk respectfully to each other. I sit looking up at that skinny triangular tower and a man and woman sit down a few feet away; he’s wearing a sweatshirt with a big TEXAS on it and I say, “How’s the city treating you?” They’re teachers at a Baptist school. I grew up evangelical. It’s their first time in New York. Their daughter lives here, wants to take up acting. There’s plenty to talk about. They both attended public schools but now they worry about bad influences. I understand. It was good to meet them. This is why people wear clothing with writing on it: it’s an invitation to conversation.

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A lucky man admits to happiness, and why not?

Joyful moments have been chasing me all week, the gorgeous singing of “O for a thousand tongues to sing” at St. Michael’s last Sunday, the happiness at 8 a.m. of little kids on their way to school on Columbus Avenue, the pleasure of singing with my pals Heather and Christine the Grateful Dead’s “Brokedown Palace,” the euphoria of an eight-month-old great-nephew as spoonfuls of pablum were brought to his mouth, and of course the arrival of spring itself after this weird unwinter and now tulips and jonquils and hyacinths in the park, plus the surprise of hearing a woman in Maryland whistling impressively through her front teeth. It’s not all raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, but I must say, it’s darned joyful.

Ask a Midwesterner, “How are you?” and we tend to say, “Not bad” or “It could be worse,” feeling it’d sound glib or boastful to say, “Delighted,” and we men in particular tend to adopt an easygoing grumpiness as suitable for all occasions, but I think it’s bad luck not to acknowledge that I am very fortunate to have added my tongue to the other 999 at church, to lift my voice with the two women’s in trio to an audience in Vermont, to see that ecstatic little boy finding the joy in pablum that the Dead tried to find in acid. I am tired of conversations with fellow libs that start with ritual lamentations about the horrors we read about in the paper. We are right to be aware of the horrors, but the display of outrage at cruelties I haven’t experienced strikes me as show-offy. Donate money to organizations that relieve suffering. Volunteer at the food shelf, visit the sick, tutor the needy children, do good where you can, and count your blessings.

My friend Jasa just returned from India where she saw leopards and tutored young women in English reading skills and was delighted by the whole experience. She’s a better person than I, but I do what I can. I’m an old man, I’m a little unsteady afoot, I have double vision: want to hear my complaints? Well, neither do I. On my phone, I have a video clip of the bright-eyed boy in the highchair, mouth open, squeaking with pleasure as the mush comes to his mouth. The beauty of Apple, putting joyfulness at our fingertips. I also have a clip of my daughter screaming in delight on a raft as waves wash toward Daddy the videographer, wetting his pants — footage of my sweetheart approaching with a birthday cake with candles that look like a major forest fire. Imagine if Adam had taken the iPhone that Eve handed him and made a video of the Garden and his naked mate and felt delight rather than shame.

When I was in eighth grade, I read A.J. Liebling in The New Yorker and so my course in life was set. I wanted to be an old Jew writing about boxing, newspapers, fine dining, and France. I didn’t succeed but I was befriended by the editor Roger Angell in my twenties and set about writing and am still at it. I came to New York in search of the writing life and I settled near Isaac Bashevis Singer’s building on 86th & Broadway. From my window I could see the buildings of Scott Fitzgerald’s “lost city, wrapped cool in its mystery.” I rode the B train to 42nd Street — I stood in the front of the first car as we came through the tunnel — and sat in the magnificent reading room of the library and wrote. In the spring of 1992, I had lunch with a violinist at a restaurant on Broadway at 90th and we’re still married. I am maintained by her love and loyalty and also her wise advice. “You need to get out more,” she says. She’s right.

I came to the city, as E.B. White said, prepared to be lucky and I was. Thoreau came to New York, walked miles and miles around town, felt there were simply too many people here, and his loathing of New York inspired him to go to the woods and write Walden. I believe a person could write a better Walden sitting in the library on 42nd but never mind me. Thoreau concluded, The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. He was in the wrong part of town, that’s all. He should’ve gone up to 90th and gotten himself a good meal and a fine wife.

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A morning walk along Columbus Avenue

Eight a.m. is a fine time to go out for a walk in New York City because you get caught up in the happiness of little kids dressed up for school, holding a parent’s hand, jazzed by the hubbub of life around them, curious and eager, jabbering about everything they see on the way, completely in the moment. Teenagers tend to be solemn, practicing their looks of angst and disdain, but the jubilation of little kids is inspiring. (It helps that I’m not responsible for any of them.) I walk down Columbus Avenue to pick up a couple bagels and coffee (black, thank you) and that first happy impression of the day sticks with me no matter what. I remember Estelle Shaver, my first-grade teacher, now consorting with archangels in Glory. I was shy, bookish, an observer, which she encouraged and which, as it turned out, saved me from a career in politics or operating a Ponzi scheme or becoming a psychic with curative powers to prevent Parkinson’s, pancreatitis, and panic attacks. I lacked the confidence to work the con.

Now I’m an old man, in no rush, keeping an eye out for curbs and crevices and treacherous slabs of sidewalk, hoping not to make a spectacle of myself, knowing that in New York I am surrounded by writers, real or imagined, who would find the crash of a tall elderly author rather satisfying. Once I was swift afoot and long astride, and now I amble along, accepting distractions, my barber Tommy, a sculptor of hair, at work in his shop, and the newsstand, a historic relic, in the Online Age, and the security woman in her yellow vest at the schoolyard gate, and these beautiful children, apartment kids growing up on crowded streets, learning social skills. I had the Mississippi River and woods to go wander off alone in and so I picked up a pencil and a Roy Rogers tablet and wrote, as I am doing now.

School didn’t really work for me. I learned out in the real world. I learned about economics years ago when I took three relatives to Paris and we stayed in a sweet little hotel near Notre-Dame, the Luxembourg Gardens, the Panthéon, and ate well and walked the narrow streets and sat in cafés and reminisced about our childhood along the Mississippi River, and the cost of it all was less than what I’d need to renovate our kitchen, which didn’t need renovation. So to my way of thinking, it was a free trip. Last year I pledged to my church an amount less than what I’d pay for full-time care if my minor cerebral incident that caused a minute of aphasia had been a major one instead and put me in a wheelchair. Thank you, Lord, and here is the refund.

I learn about unfairness whenever I consider that I have had 64 years more than my cousin Roger who, a week before high school graduation, went swimming with a girl he had a crush on and dove from a boat though he couldn’t swim a stroke, trying to impress her, and drowned. He was a hero of mine and from his senseless death I learned that injustice is everywhere. Now I’m old, I wince when the flight attendant refers to our “final destination” or someone asks, “What was your last book about?” and I still sometimes think of Roger standing in the stern of the boat, bending forward, and I try to stop him.

It’s the age of gratitude, 81. A motorcycle roars past and I remember my motorcycle ride on the winding roads of Patmos with my girlfriend hanging on to me, a nerdy writer suddenly become daredevil Evel Keillor. I step into H&H Bagels and remember going into the Horn & Hardart Automat when I was eleven, on a trip from Minnesota, just me and my dad. It was, I can see now, the great privilege of my life. Mother made him take me but he was good about it. We saw the wonders together, Grand Central, the Empire State, Miss Liberty. That trip shines forever in memory.

I want to tell the parents on Columbus Avenue, “Take that kid on a trip alone with you to the Grand Canyon or Greenland or some other stunning spot; the privilege will see that kid through many hard times.” Bestow yourself. Eleven is an age of wonderment. Take time to be wonderful.

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Hard-earned wisdom passed on at no charge

There never was a bad nap. I pass this wisdom on to you, as an old man who has experienced more disappointment than you’ll ever know and it took me 75 years to learn how to deal with it: you lie down, close your eyes, and wake up feeling better.

I used to eat Wheaties because they sponsored “Jack Armstrong, The All-American Boy” on the radio back before the rest of you were born and a men’s quartet sang, “Have you tried Wheaties? They’re whole wheat with all of the bran. Won’t you try Wheaties? For wheat is the best food of man.” Jack traveled the world foiling the evil plans of villains, and Wheaties were made by General Mills, based in Minneapolis, and Jack was based on a student at the University of Minnesota, which I intended to attend (and did, and graduated with a B.A.), and I was loyal to it for years, but last year, the most profitable in General Mills’s history, they jacked up the price of Wheaties to $8 while reducing the food content, and I felt betrayed and I haven’t put a spoonful of the Breakfast of Champions to my lips. The cereal in the box is worth about a dime, the box itself about a quarter, and the rest goes to enable a battalion of execs to own homes in Minneapolis and Aruba and Aspen and fly to Paris for a weekend. Nothing to do with foiling evil plans.

This disappoints me and I lie down for twenty minutes and the feeling passes though the boycott continues.

I feel the same way about the University, having learned that the football coach’s salary is ten times that of the U’s president. Not another penny should they expect from me. A nap ensues, and I go on to other issues.

Sometimes I’m stricken with dread that I will trip on a molehill and fall and hit my head on some geologic formation and suddenly I’ll be unable to spell “isosceles” and “insouciant” and “Piscacadawadaquoddymoggin” or remember the name of my cousin Joyce’s husband or be able to stand on one foot for thirty seconds and I’ll be on a downhill slide toward becoming a burden to others and my beloved, a skilled musician, will feel obligated to become a caregiver. Yikes!! But I lie down and in a little while, dread evaporates.

Mostly I live in a comfortable bubble, enjoying my morning coffee, avoiding bad news that’s beyond my power to affect, bloody wars raging in Ukraine and Gaza, brutal civil wars in Myanmar and Africa, waves of migrants trying to escape violence and poverty — I am mostly oblivious. The Christian missionaries who set out to save souls in Africa and South America saw the world much more clearly than I do. The Ecuadorean moms selling candy bars in subway stations know more about real life than I do. A person could walk along the little shops in low-rent neighborhoods and talk to immigrant entrepreneurs and learn more about the world than if you went to grad school for a Ph.D., but nobody I know does.

I ignore my relatives who are loyal to Mr. Presidefendant who is as removed from reality as I am. I went to high school with a Jim Jordan, a Matt Gaetz, a Mike Johnson, but my classmates don’t hold public office, they just hold a mug of beer in the corner saloon while they grouse about the unfairness of life. A nap would do them good.

Last week New York City felt an earthquake centered in New Jersey that measured 4.8 on the Richter scale, a slight tremor compared to the 7.4 quake on Taiwan. Some news reports used the verb “hit” but what I felt was only a vibration similar to what you feel standing on the corner as a bus goes by. A few days later the city went all out for the semi-total eclipse of the sun. Crowds gathered in Central Park, the manufacturers of eclipse glasses got rich, and my beloved was tremendously thrilled by the whole astronomical experience. It was a joyful communal experience for millions. For me, looking up at the darkened sky to see a tiny pinpoint of corona was a huge disappointment. I was expecting to be transformed in some way, and if not Raptured, at least enlightened, but the thrill was a good deal less than what I get from the average candle in the dark.

The eclipse occurred around 3:20 p.m. and I lay down around 4 and felt much better by 4:30.

If this column has disappointed you, go back and read the first paragraph.

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Man walks out on stage as storm rolls in

I did my solo stand-up act in Ohio last week and in the midst of a story, the auditorium shook with a blast of thunder. I paused. The audience laughed. Another roll of thunder. And I started singing, “How Great Thou Art,” with the line, “I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,” and the audience joined in en masse, they knew the words, they sang it so beautifully, the chorus drowned out the thunder. I was telling a story about me as a teenager necking with a girl in a car and when thunder struck again, I looked up at the ceiling, addressing the Lord, and said, “It was her idea, it wasn’t mine. She unbuttoned my shirt.”

I loved that audience dearly and gave them a good ninety minutes and afterward a distinguished man stopped by to shake hands. Back when, he’d heard me on the radio. I said, “I detect an air of authority about you. You’re the president of something.” He said he was a retired Army major; he’d commanded a tank battalion. “Where?” I said. “Vietnam,” he said. I said I’d never heard of tanks used in Vietnam. He said, “That’s because they would’ve sunk four feet down in the Delta and so they were useless. When we got there, we became infantry.”

I said, “You’re looking at a draft dodger.” I felt I owed it to him. I said that I was ordered to report for induction and I wrote to the draft board and told them why I wouldn’t go and I didn’t. I waited for the knock on the door and it never came. So I did a radio show for fifty years without using my name. He looked me in the eye and said, “You did the right thing.” It was a profound moment. I felt that an accommodation had been made. I was forgiven by a man who had earned that right. There was no need to say more.

The next morning at the hotel I ran into a couple who’d been to the show and said they liked it. Back when I was more hip, I took the audience for granted and now I don’t. The woman worked for Campbell’s Soup and the man was a painting contractor, they’d been married 43 years, had driven three hours to see the show, and we stood around and talked for a while, and I was not a celebrity to them, I was sort of a relative. They each came from a large family, as do I; their mothers had been canners, so was mine; they had lost a young son to epilepsy, I lost a brother and a grandson. I have no idea if they are Republicans or Democrats; I didn’t think to ask.

I went into radio for which I had no aptitude but I was old enough to remember radio in its prime, the amiable hosts, the comedians, the adventure stories, and I became briefly a big deal back in the Eighties and invented Lake

Wobegon and Guy Noir and the cowboys Dusty and Lefty and the American Duct Tape Council and the Federated Organization of Associations and now that I’m off the air, my audience is a fraction of what it once was but it’s so much more fun now. A keen sense of mortality makes each day sort of splendid and I loved meeting the major and the painter and the soup lady. I loved meeting the enema lady.

Years ago, I went to a clinic to have my prostate seen to and I lay on my side in a small dark room where the woman apologized to me and then began the procedure, and when the tube was in and the water was flowing, she said, “I have to tell you that I’m a big fan of your show.” She said, “I think your singing has improved a lot over the years.” “Thank you,” I said. She said, “Lie here until you feel a compelling urge to vacate and then get up and go to the toilet.” And then she said, “Who wrote that song about ‘these are the days’? Did you?”

“No, Van Morrison did,” and I quoted the lines, These are the days now that we must savor; we must enjoy while we can. These are the days that will last forever; you’ve got to hold them in your hand. And I do. Cherish the day, my friend. Each one is illuminated by small miracles.

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The joy of standing with arm upraised

It was plain and simple joy to sit in a packed church on Easter Sunday and sing the Alleluias and listen to the story of the women finding the tomb empty and wait in a long line for Communion. We Episcopalians have been known to marry existentialists, hedonists, individualists, pantheists, Baptists, and disAnglified sophisticates, and it’s lovely to have them all under the tent to celebrate Christ’s Resurrection regardless of what doubts may flutter in their heads. I grew up among separatist fundamentalists, a joyless and judgmental lot, and this was entirely different, public happiness openly shared. The women at the tomb where his body had been laid were afraid but there was no fear among us on Sunday morning, and in Manhattan, where one’s mind easily turns to dark scenarios, this joy is palpable.

And after Communion, we stood and sang a beloved Catholic hymn whose chorus, “And I will raise them up, and I will raise them up on the last day,” brings many of us to tears, and though Episcopalian, members of the church of the wingtips and tweed vests, in our wave of feeling we raise one arm like storefront Pentecostals, and I think of my dead brother, my grandson Freddy, my parents and my wife’s parents, and feel the glow of faith that we will be reunited. This faith is not an intellectual feat; it feels miraculous and I carry it around all day.

Life is miraculous. The Lord is good and his mercy endureth forever. I walked away from the separatists when I was 20. My father was faithful to them all his life and was disappointed by my erratic ways but never said a word about it to me. He was a carpenter and I might’ve become one too but I was kicked out of shop class in 8th grade because I was joking around while running a power saw; Mr. Orville Buehler said, “All you do is talk so I’m sending you up to Speech,” and so, instead of a life on the assembly line, I wound up in broadcasting. I am a stranger to the toolbox; my wife does the home repairs. My father was terrified any time he had to speak in public; I stood on a stage in Newberry, S.C., on Good Friday and told stories for two hours without notes and loved every minute of it and especially when I had them sing, “It Is Well With My Soul” united in a cappella harmony. They knew the words by heart, and also “America” and “Going to the Chapel” and “How Great Thou Art,” and I didn’t see anybody googling with their cellphones.

Life is good. Surgeons can run a tube up a vein in your groin and repair your innards easily where years ago they had to open up your chest and create Frankenstein scars that brought your career as a swimsuit model to a crashing halt. GPS is being developed for home use so that as a man stands at the toilet, a voice says, “Aim slightly to the right.” Beautiful names are being given to infants that didn’t used to be available, like Seraphina, Arabella, Camila, Penelope, Autumn, Aurora, Prairie. In my lifetime, longevity has lengthened –– look at the obits –– if you live to be 96 or 97, it means you can do dumb things well into your seventies and still have time to recover. Me, for example. Eighty-one and I’m writing a novel although the Age of White Male Authorship is long past. I’m still out on the road doing shows, talking, singing, hoping to get a spot on the Ed Sullivan show. That was on Sunday nights and all of America sat down and watched Ed, he replaced Sunday night Bible study, it was the beginning of the decline of Protestantism, but thank God we still observe Easter and are capable of joy at finding the tomb empty.

And then on the long walk home afterward, it struck me that I hadn’t thought for a single moment about the Mafia Don running for the White House, the incredible con man selling his souvenir Bibles for $59.99, the most despised politician in our history, after Jefferson Davis, hoping to sneak into power via the Electoral College. There is nothing about the Resurrection that calls this man to mind. He isn’t part of that story. He is making America pray again but not in the way he might like to imagine.

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A letter from Greenville, S.C.

I spent last week gadding about the Carolinas doing shows and enjoying the South, eating eggs and grits and hearing the waitress say, “Can I get you more coffee, darling?” and encountering Republicans, a tribe rarer than Mohicans on the West Side of Manhattan where I live. I miss them. My uncles tended Republican, believing in personal responsibility and fiscal reality, and at church on Palm Sunday, at coffee hour, I heard the word “taxes” uttered contemptuously and a gentleman in his sixties was saying, “Everything government touches, it messes up,” a genuine living Republican. Twenty minutes before, at Mass, he had been forgiven his iniquity, and I wanted to put my arms around him.

I am comfortable in the South. I’m okay with not talking politics with crazy people. Yes, in the rural areas, they display the Confederate flag, but I’ve got junk in my closet too. I see no need to remove statues of Civil War heroes: just paint their uniforms olive drab and enlist them in the U.S. Army. A good summer job for teenagers.

I love the warmth of the people. At my shows, I like to have the audience sing, just for the sensuous warmth of it. We sing “My country, ’tis of thee” and in the South we can sing a hymn or two a cappella and it’s amazing to observe this from the stage, people who are surprised and delighted and moved by the beauty of their voices mingled with the others. They learned this as Baptist kids and then (I imagine) lapsed into secular humanism and went through doctrine therapy and devoted themselves to vintage wines and dark coffees and French baking, and now, as I sing “When peace like a river attendeth my way and sorrows like sea billows roll,” the words come back to them and they sing like risen saints at the Sunday camp meeting and they dab at their eyes with a hanky. After that and “Amazing Grace,” I can get them to sing the Battle Hymn of the Republic and lay down their arms.

For the stand-up part of my act, I grieved over the mild winter in Minnesota, the lack of ice fishing, snowmobiling, the loss of the Fellowship of the Jumper Cables, the lack of adversity that gives us northerners our sense of identity, and I brought Carolinians (many of them exiled northerners) to genuinely feel the loss. And having accomplished that, I set out to convince them that aging is the best thing that can happen to them and why they should embrace it. It’s an impressive feat when you get millennials to buy into this.

And then my singing partners Heather Masse and Christine DiGiallonardo joined me in singing songs by my fellow octogenarians Jerry Garcia, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, McCartney & Lennon, and when we sing in three-part harmony, “These are the days of the endless summer, there is no past, there’s only now,” I believe in it though I’m twice my singing partners’ age and have so much past from back before they were born.

And in the course of doing these shows I feel a profound mystery: it’s much more fun being an old has-been than it was to be a big success. When I was briefly a big success forty years ago, people stood in line to interview me and ask how it felt to be so admired. It felt fearful, like looking over the edge of a cliff and a thousand feet down to rocky beach and surf.

Four decades later, I’m wading in gentle surf, singing “Under African Skies” and “In My Life” and “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” with Heather and Christine and Richard Dworsky at the piano. He is Jewish but plays gospel very very well. We do “Nearer My God to Thee” and people in the front rows are ready to come forward.

A showman gets old, the audience goes into assisted living, the crowd shrinks, and I can see I’m coming closer and closer to what my mother prayed I would be, a preacher. When I’m 90, I’ll be standing on a street corner in Greenville, South Carolina, Bible in hand, preaching, “Give thanks to the Lord for He is good, His mercy endureth forever,” and if you hear me singing, come stand close by and join in. There’ll be no collection, just sing with me, darling.

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Everyone’s a member of the subway

Some friends of mine put me up for membership in a very exclusive New York club, one where you go and meet all the right sort of people who know things that a nice Midwestern guy doesn’t, such as where can I find a really vicious lawyer when I need one and how can I improve my chances of getting a rave review in the Times, so the friends wrote recommendations and the admissions committee interviewed me, and a week later I was rejected for the best of reasons, because I was dumb.

It was a Monday, 2 p.m. I flew into LaGuardia that morning with a suitcase so I took a cab home to the West Side and decided to take a shower and freshen up. Dumb. I should’ve gone straight to the club but instead I made myself fresh and winsome and dashed to the subway and took the B train to near the club and then came out of the subway and in confusion walked the wrong way and arrived at the club half an hour late.

I left my cellphone in my coat at the door, forgetting that I need an app on the phone to control volume on my hearing aids, so when I sat down with the committee a half hour late, I could only hear fragments of what they said and rather than excuse myself and go solve the problem, I tried to imagine what they said and I improvised, I told stories, I tried to be amusing, and for all I know, they were asking about my career and I was talking about cashmere. It was a chilly goodbye.

And a few days later I was rejected. Justly. Why would you admit a demented man to your club — there are care centers for those people.

It’s too late for me to be exclusive, when I think of the dumb things I’ve done, blunders with money, mistaken love, screwing up a simple interview. I’ve done things so stupid, I am earnestly hoping for memory loss. Plagiarism is one of the few sins I haven’t committed, otherwise in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state. I was rather distinguished back in 1986 when the editors of the Los Angeles Times hosted a luncheon in my honor and my old friend Irv Letofsky, who was reporting for the paper, sidled up to me and said, “I knew you when you were just white trash.” I loved that man. He was from North Dakota where they don’t put on airs.

I have a number of clubs already, the Episcopal church a half mile away, which lifts the spirits of its people, and another is the reading room in the public library where I sit among silent studious men and women one-fourth my age, and another is the subway, which rolls into the station and I enter the nearest door and find myself in a new assortment of people, always surprising, some of whom could use a vicious lawyer or a rave review, others are doing okay as is.

The train heads downtown and a lady walks through the car, hand outstretched, saying, “Can anybody help me?” over and over, and most people look away, some shake their heads, some study her, and it’s a moment of simple human truth. The conscience is touched, you hear people thinking, “She’s only using it for drugs,” and someone else, “Hungry children may wait in a tenement basement in the Bronx,” and the hungry children win out, I reach in my pocket, meaning to get a one but I find a roll of bills, I’ve been to an ATM, and her eye is on me and I pull out a fifty and give it to her. I like fifties, they make me feel rich.

This is a tender human moment between strangers. She whispers, “Thank you very much,” and I’ll take that whisper home with me. I am not better than she. Jesus doesn’t think so, neither do I. I worked very hard but I enjoyed it all and I was wildly lucky. Giving her the fifty reminds me of just how lucky I’ve been and then it’s worth a couple hundred, a decent profit for a short ride. We should start a Good Luck Club, wear a clover badge, you recognize another member, you are obliged to tell them a joke. “Why are you scratching yourself?” “Because I’m the only one who knows where it itches.” You’re welcome.

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Forget the bunny, it’s about resurrection

Easter is almost upon us when we Christians take a deep breath after Lent and relax and whoop it up a little. I mean, rising from the dead is no ordinary thing — if you were heading to the airport and passed a cemetery and saw people coming up out of the ground, wouldn’t you pull over and take a video with your iPhone even if your flight is boarding in an hour? Of course you would.

And what if it were a Unitarian cemetery, a mausoleum with a large silver question mark on the roof instead of a cross, and you saw clouds of ashes forming into friendly people nicely dressed and a couple of them are standing by the highway, hitchhiking, and you stop and they get in and the guy says, “Wow, you won’t believe what we’ve just seen.”?

I’m much older than you and I know more deceased people than you do, aunts and uncles plus all my teachers and a great many classmates, so the Resurrection Day would be more dramatic for me, more names to remember, more people wanting to tell me their afterlife experiences and there’d be name-dropping, of course, saints and apostles, authors, sports heroes. I’d listen politely.

Some Christians feel that the dead are looking down on us from above and that we’ll have explaining to do, but I don’t believe that. I don’t have any idea what death is like and I don’t sit and ponder that. I only hope that someone will hold my hand and if she is playing “Peace in the Valley” or “I’ll Fly Away,” I can speak and tell her to please stop.

I know that life is a one-way trip but if I went to my doctor and he shook his head and explained disseminated angiofibrosis of the fantods for which there is no cure, I imagine getting in the car, not fastening the seat belt, driving to the liquor store to buy a quart of gin and a carton of Luckies, and heading home to celebrate the end of sobriety and my career as a liberal Democrat worried about climate change; I’d cash in the bonds and get the penthouse suite on the Queen Mary 2 for a round-the-world cruise and plan to spend evenings in the casino.

Meanwhile, I’m feeling rather cheerful. The paper is full of suffering but I’m still thinking about the 93-year-old widow of a Wall Street financier who has donated $1 billion to a medical school in the Bronx to pay tuition for all the students. Dr. Ruth Gottesman.

There was a doctor named Ruth

Devoted to goodness and truth

Who donated a pile

To install a free stile

In place of the college tollbooth.

I read about a public opinion poll in Ukraine that showed 77% are optimistic about the country’s future. This, while rocket and drone attacks are an ordinary occurrence, six million have fled the country, half the people have trouble feeding and housing their families. This is optimism of a heroic order. Here in America, where the Canadian army is not launching missiles at Manhattan, 42% are optimistic. What’s wrong?

And the presidential candidate of a major party is out on the campaign trail telling Americans that we have become a third-world country. Where did he get this? Has he been to Mozambique or Myanmar lately?

There’s no end of bad news, of course. Cosmetic companies are targeting young children in advertising skin care products. The East Coast is sinking due to over-pumping of ground water by municipalities, meanwhile the sea is rising, so although our New York apartment is on the 12th floor, someday we’ll be on the 11th, the 10th, 9th, and eventually in a sub-basement flat along with snakes and turtles. And I grieve for the Florida billionaire unable to find a surety company to guarantee his bond. What is wrong with people?

It’s enough to keep a person awake at night, but then I found a method that works for me. I lie in the dark and imagine I’m in Stockholm, at the royal palace. I’ve won the Nobel Prize in Physics with a formula I discovered in a dream that unlocked several secrets of the Creation and there I am, ignorant of physics but surrounded by Swedish royalty, an honor guard, ranks of scholars in caps and gowns, cheering crowds, and there, risen from the dead, is Mr. Swenson who gave me a C-minus in 10th grade Physics and even that was charitable. He is beaming, arrayed in shining white raiment, as we all shall be someday, or so I have heard.

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Why I’m happy and you should be too

It’s so good being an old man that if I’d only known, I’d have arrived at 81 sooner, and I don’t just mean senior discounts. I mean the liberation from hipness, being out of the loop, going to bed early, not reading book reviews or pundits. William Butler Yeats said it all in 1919: “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” My wife just walked over in her pajamas as I was googling the Yeats and she leaned down and I was filled with passionate intensity, so I’m no better than you, I’m just older.

I don’t go to movies anymore — don’t know the actors and the butter on the popcorn is worse than ever — don’t watch TV because the remote is way beyond my pay grade. That’s why I’m not a Republican: I never watched “The Apprentice” — and there was a deadness in the man’s eyes that told the truth. I read a transcript of his speech in Rome, Georgia, a week ago: “We have the stupidest people in the history of our country running things. These are stupid, these are stupid people. And we should be saying, ‘Crooked Joe, you are fired. Get out of here. You are fired. You’re incompetent. You’re incompetent. Get out of here. You’re destroying our nation. Get the hell out of here. You’re destroying our country, Joe.’ He doesn’t have a clue. He doesn’t even know. He doesn’t know he is destroying it. He has no clue. He has no clue.”

No other president could have talked like that except maybe in his sleep, stood up in public at a microphone and said, “You’re stupid. You’re a stupid dummy. Dummy, dummy, dummy, dummy, dummy. Get me? You’re stupid.” This man makes George W. Bush seem like Winston Churchill. The party of Lincoln is falling in line but we’re Americans, we don’t pay money for a bowl of cat turd soup that’s labeled Cream of Mushroom, so don’t lose hope. If the voters listen to the man and look into his eyes, he’ll win Alabama and Mississippi, claim fraud, and go live in Riyadh. Praise the Lord.

Old age is all about gratitude. I’m a lucky man. I chose the right parents, two fundamentalists so I’m guilt-ridden, yes, but there was no fetal alcohol syndrome. Guilt made me a better husband. In the 8th grade, Mr. Orville Buehler saw me joking around in shop class while my rotary power saw was screaming through a 2×6, and he kicked me out and sent me up to LaVona Person’s speech class, a turning point in my life. I made my living by talking and avoided hard work, avoided drowning and highway fatality and drug addiction, avoided therapy so I never found out how troubled I was, which would’ve depressed me.

I am funnier now than I used to be, thanks to flatulence. Women don’t experience this because they talk a lot and so the pressure never builds up, but every man over 70 has four or five eruptions a day and so laughter follows us wherever we go. That’s why Speaker Johnson had that look on his face sitting behind Joe during the State of the Onion. I am still doing shows and my band sits behind me and has a whee of a time. And now Palm Sunday is coming when we Piskies clap our hands and dance and then Easter when one candidate will be in church hearing about the Resurrection and the other will be playing golf and not counting the shots he doesn’t like. And then Opening Day on March 28 and the nation returns to rational thinking. If a pitcher stands on the mound and yells, “You’re a dummy, you got no clue, you stupid dummy,” he still has to throw the ball and the batter can take a swing. It’s a beautiful game. No longer the national pastime, but we old liberals like it.

Things are looking up. It was a miserable winter, dreary rainy days instead of snow, but now the daffodils and tulips are blooming, and this spring I am really truly going to sit down and read Moby-Dick. I was an English major, I took a course in Melville in 1963, wrote a paper about the symbolism of Moby-Dickand got a B on it but never read the dang book. I’m told it’s good. Ahab goes down with the whale, Ishmael survives, using Queequeg’s coffin for a buoy. Melville’s buried in the Bronx, at the end of the No. 4 subway. When I’m done with the book, I’ll go out and put daffodils on his grave.

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