Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 2

One favor, Lord, if you have a moment

I’ve been seeing doctors lately, which is okay by me. I am a triumph of modern medicine, an 83-year-old with an adolescent pig valve in my heart and when you imagine how many pigs must’ve given their lives before science got that procedure figured out, pigs who gave up their chance at a rich full life and the pleasure of parenthood, it obliges me not to spend my bonus years watching sitcoms. But thanks to medicine, I received extra time to make several serious mistakes and have the chance to recover.

I am very fond of doctors. Competence is admirable, especially when it’s for your own personal benefit. I like to write limericks for them, such as the neurologist Matthew Fink:

I went to see Doctor Fink
Who said, “It’s good you don’t drink,
And by whatever path you
Can avoid math you
Will be happier, I think.”

I sit in the waiting room and in five minutes I can write a pretty decent one:

I go to see Doctor Tom Nash
About jitters, soreness, or rash,
Or aches in my legs
And I pay him with eggs
And vegetables instead of cash.

What better thing to do while sitting and looking at your fellow patients and not allowing yourself to ask, “What’s wrong with you?”

My physician, Doctor Hensrud,
Saw me once partially nude,
Which wasn’t shocking
But he started talking
About my intake of food.

I feel pretty good and sometimes terrific even as I am slowly falling apart. I was in the hospital for eyelid surgery a few weeks ago and came under the ministrations of heroic nurses, a cult of kindness and patience. Lying miserable in the night, alarmed by thoughts of losing my sight and the world becoming a blank page, I pressed the red buzzer button and heard gentle footsteps and a kind soul said, “How can I help?”

Good Lord, it was a man. Someone from my gender of hockey players slamming opponents into the boards, but instead he dripped saline drops into each burning eye. I didn’t tell him I was miserable; I could tell from the gentleness of his hand and voice that he knew.

Tennessee Williams said, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” And so do we all.

In the annals of human suffering, surgery post-op doesn’t rank high, but I feel aligned with my beloved old relatives who slipped away. I was a busy achiever, I was not a comforter, I had no time for hand-holding. I grieve for Jimmy, Bruce, Roger, Lynn, Freddy, who died young, the lives unlived. I pray for my dependents.

I ask a favor of God, that I not die a dumb death. Let me leave in dignity, please. Tennessee Williams strangled to death, swallowing a bottle cap. My friend Barry Halper, 21, driving to start his first radio job east of St. Paul early one morning, looked away from the road — to turn on the radio? To reach for the cigarette lighter? — and crashed into the rear of a school bus. Dead. Gone. An only child. At the funeral, I sat next to his mother, her arms around me, sobbing on my shoulder.

I imagine myself walking along Amsterdam Avenue one sunny afternoon, not noticing the bike lane, and a delivery man on a fast electric bicycle kills me. He’s carrying a half-gallon container of my favorite pasta of all time, orecchiette alla barese with sausage and broccoli, tomato sauce, garlic, parmesan. My body is thrown into a No Parking zone, covered with pasta sauce. Even though unconscious, I can smell it.

A woman dashes out and feels for my pulse and there is none. Passersby pause and then continue. The delivery man leaves quietly with his bicycle. A squad car pulls over and sees an elderly man who apparently ate too much. No billfold in his pocket. The delivery guy took it and is on the phone a few blocks away, buying himself a one-way ticket to Rome on my Visa card. First class, why not.

His girlfriend works at a bank nearby. Between the two of them they clean out my checking account of thirty thou. After all, it was traumatic for him too.

Keep me on the sidewalk and out of the bike lane, Lord. Don’t let me die covered in tomato sauce. Let me finish up today in good style and then we’ll talk about tomorrow.

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The purpose of life, I’ve decided

I dreamed about my Grandma Dora the other night and told her about my vision problems and she said, “There is no cure for carelessness. You should’ve taken a good brisk walk every day and you couldn’t because you lived in the city. But you inherited good genes from me and my husband, thanks to which you have practically no anxiety and sleep well and wake up fresh. So what if you see double and can’t read small print? Do your best with what you have.”

Grandma was a seamstress who made her own elegant clothes. She and her twin sister, Della, were Western Union telegraphers, and Grandma also taught school and was a pre-suffrage feminist, and then she married Grandpa who was a better reader than a farmer but adored her, and she bore him eight children whom she loved dearly and believed could do no wrong. She admired technology and science and looked forward to progress on all fronts. I think I take after Grandpa and luckily avoided farming and took up broadcasting. In that line of work, you give the weather, you don’t depend on it.

There’s nothing so fortunate as having the right ancestors, and Grandma Dora is still with me. And now I am just one year younger than she when she died of a stroke at 84. I sat holding her hand in the hospital, thinking of the questions I wished I had asked. Thanks to anti-seizure meds, I apparently have extra time and I should use it to good purpose and a week or so ago I decided what that purpose should be.

Grandma worked hard all her life, and after she raised her kids and Grandpa died, she made the rounds of her daughters, doing laundry, cooking, cleaning, minding children. I prefer to plow new ground and devote myself to sheer simple unalloyed devotion to pure pleasure and let the world deal with its own problems as best it can. Let a man’s life end with a sabbatical.

I came by this revelation in Logan, Utah, but not from an angel handing me golden tablets. No, from a crowded theater where the audience, at my invitation, sang our national anthem so beautifully, followed by the Battle Hymn of the Republic and “How Great Thou Art” and “It Is Well With My Soul,” in full harmony from the heart, a force of nature, and it brought tears to my eyes, me singing a soft basement part.

I make no comment about their doctrine but Mormons do love to sing. And it was clear from crowd unreaction to a couple lines of mine that a goodly number of them had voted for a convicted criminal and chronic liar who cut cancer research to benefit billionaires, but I say no more. Let George F. Will and Susan B. Glasser take it from here.

I flew home the next day and, without meaning to, boarded an electric passenger cart, the young man at the wheel was so friendly, I got on and immediately felt ashamed — I mean, I’m 83 but I’m still ambulatory — but as he tooled down the concourse, veering through streams of pedestrians, I had to admit, It was enjoyable. The driver was from Rwanda and most of the other cart drivers appeared to be African. They all seemed to know each other and form a brotherhood with the wheelchair pushers, waving to each other, high-fiving, kidding around. There was a lot of good feeling going around. I pursue brotherhood on the stage, storytelling, reciting, humming a note and hearing the crowd sing about the sweet chariot, the brown-eyed girl, the river that flows by the throne of God, the amazing grace, the home on the range.

I come from people who read Ecclesiastes, the verse that says he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow, and so I avoid the front-page story saying that America is incapable of fighting a protracted war against a major power and prevailing — not due to woke generals but to industrial incapacity. I’d rather be happy on the road doing shows. My life is quite easy, why fight it? It’s advantageous to be 83. The country is not looking to my generation for leadership. We’re done. We are, by virtue of old age, humorists. If we take ourselves seriously, we become ridiculous — like our aged commander and his ideas about Canada, Greenland, Gaza, tariffs, the border wall, Ukraine, prosperity, and the use of capital letters to indicate seriousness.

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Remembering you but not the rest of it

I did a show Saturday night singing duets with a tall woman and was so fascinated by the perfect harmonies on the Everlys’ “Let It Be Me” that I forgot to take an intermission until almost two hours had passed and I saw elderly people my age dashing in panic up the aisle to empty their bladders, a weird feeling, to create something so wonderful you wind up torturing people, sort of like painting a mural so beautiful people gaze at it and don’t notice the stairs and fall and break an arm.

I was a writer for years but dreamed of being a singer and now here I was singing good tenor to a fabulous soprano, meanwhile hundreds of people were hoping not to wet their pants. An out-of-body experience for me, a physical reality for them.

It’s a night I’ll remember for the rest of my life (I’m 83) whereas vast acres of my middle and elder years are a blank to me, which worries my beloved. “You remember that September in Paris, the little café on the square with the fountain, the strolling gypsy guitarist,” she says, but I don’t. “The nymph in the fountain, the pigeons on her shoulders?” Don’t remember them either.

I remember when I was a kid, our family driving home from Sunday night gospel meeting and stopping at A&W for root beer floats, how beautiful they were after an hour of contemplating eternal damnation. I remember being sent to Aunt Jo’s house when my mother was having babies, a house with a wood-burning stove and outhouse like in Little House on the Prairie. I remember my first time on skis, skidding down a steep hill and thinking, “I will never do this again,” a promise I have kept.

The show with Heather Masse, the tall woman, was at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, where I had done hundreds of shows back in a former life, and people asked, “Doesn’t it feel wonderful to be back here?” and the answer was No. Way too much went on there for anyone to remember. Clutter preventing nostalgia.

But I remember doing shows at Radio City Music Hall with Don and Phil Everly thirty-some years ago. The two in shiny green suits rising on the stage elevator, strumming, singing “I bless the day I found you, I want to stay around you,” the beautiful sigh of the crowd. I grew up listening to them, my favorite pop stars — I come from polite well-behaved people so the Stones and the Dead were not available to me; I liked Simon and Garfunkel and Don and Phil.

Backstage I noticed that the brothers never kidded each other and hardly ever looked each other in the eye. Thirty years of close harmony singing the same hit songs night after night, year after year, handcuffed in stardom, had created a brotherhood that threatened to devour them so they were very formal around each other. Chet Atkins and Leo Kottke were on that show along with my Shoe Band and all of them joked around more or less continually, trying to make everyone laugh. Every guitarist’s secret wish, to put down the Martin and pick up a mic and do a stand-up comedy.

After the show Saturday, in bed at the hotel, lying next to my beloved reading Jane Eyre, I asked, “How’s that book you’re reading?” She said, “It’s great.” In other words, “Don’t talk to me.” And I wondered if she’d read some of my books. I wrote quite a few. If you slept with an author, wouldn’t you think you might? Or no? Maybe romance requires mystery, and intimacy is about intimations. Not many therapists marry their patients. And perhaps my deletions of recall are a way of staying young. I had my regrets about the show last night and now it’s a new day and a fresh start. And believe it or not, I’m working on a musical about longevity. People dread getting old but they don’t want to die: that’s the hook.

The secret is not a calm disposition.
It isn’t a deep inner strength
Or a good physician.
The secret of longevity is length.

Dinner waited on the table
And Mrs. Melville paced the floor
As Herman worked his little fable
Slowly into something more.

Each hour, each day, each step you take
Creeps slowly like a crustacean,
Until the candles on your cake
Become a conflagration.

Life is good, people. Especially if you use the Delete key.

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The pros and cons of capable parenting

I paid a visit to new parents last week, their first child, a 90-day-old girl, and it brought back memories of my own fatherhood — ignorance, dread, fear of dropping the child or over-swaddling it and cutting off oxygen to the brain and leading to drug abuse and years of treatment — but what astonished me was the calm of these parents, their confident pleasure, their mastery of the situation.

These two had studied up for this. They used terms like “cognitive stimulation” and “maximization of proactive engagement.” They kept a chart recording her versatility skills — vocal intensity, 2.4, and analysis/synthesis, 1.3 — intent on giving the infant the best possible start in life and nurture her individuality while also preparing her for the collectivist constellations of the high-tech life ahead. Back in my fathering years, I just hoped not to burp my baby too hard and cause disorganized thinking.

Some parenting skills remain the same, such as jiggling. I remember my grandma jiggling my younger siblings, standing them on her lap and gently bouncing them, which calmed them down, perhaps due to a primal memory handed down hereditarily and chromosomally of riding on a maternal backpack on a horse crossing the Great Plains. My mother walked around the living room with tiny twin boys in her arms, jiggling them for hours, as a result of which she had the upper-body strength of a stevedore. It’s good to know that some aspects of parenting remain standard.

And then there is the baby carrier, the cloth pouch worn by a parent holding the infant close to your body. We had one back in the ancient Seventies, a BabyBjörn, and it was expensive and had a zipper and I used it in fear that the child might smother in it and I’d be sent up for infanticide. When my second child came along years later, there were dozens of carrier devices on the market, one made of silk and cashmere selling for $800, which I thought a ridiculous waste of money and then was attacked by guilt — is not the emotional health of your child worth eight hundred dollars? What cost limit does a caring parent put on goods and services to help an infant function confidently and adapt to difficult life situations?

The young couple I saw last week simply used two loops of cloth slung around parental neck and arms, holding the infant securely close to the parental warmth, a primeval device similar to those probably used by Tibetan sheepherders in the 12th century as they slipped through the forest needing to keep the baby silent lest its cries alert the Mongol pursuers and bring them galloping up with sabers flashing. The carriers worked. Tibet exists.

The couple’s little girl lay bound to her mother’s chest, sleeping peacefully, in a relationship that seemed more egalitarian than hierarchical, and I looked at her and remembered no such comfort in my infancy. No carrier for me. I lay on a blanket on the floor surrounded by giant adults staring down at me, feeling dread, ashamed of my lack of toileting skills. I was persecuted by an older sister. Dogs sniffed me, chandeliers swung high overhead, men in big boots walked inches away, death lay on every hand. Considering my childhood traumas, I’ve done fairly well for myself. I’m okay on the printed page anyway — aren’t I? don’t I seem somewhat adept at language? Grammatical, at least? At least I can spell okay.

The little girl I saw seemed anxiety-free, aside from fear of starvation, which she expressed from time to time. She was on the road to translating ideas into actions to solve problems. Quite an improvement at three months.
And yet, there is no problem so threatening to a child as the Perfect Parent. I’ve seen this again and again, the gentle rational well-prepared parent who winds up with angry fascist children covered with gothic tattoos, the loving enlightenment of the elders forcing the young into rebellion. Amish parents whose kids turn to Black Sabbath for comfort.

My daughter, at 27, does well with a smart caring mother and a helpless father. It has taught her kindness and mercy. She often needs to resist her mother but when she sees me, she takes me by the hand and helps me over the rough places. She occasionally argues with her mother but with me she’s taken on a caregiving role. Kindness is a beautiful thing. I’ve come to depend on it.

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How it all happened, thank goodness

My neurologist says I have multifocal cerebral infarcts primarily cortically based and a narrowing of the left palpebral fissure, and yet I clearly recall the screech and rumble of the big yellow streetcars along Bloomington Avenue in Minneapolis in 1947, the jingle of coins dropping into the farebox, the clang of the conductor’s dishpan bell as the motorman swung the big wooden handle and the streetcar rolled down the street toward downtown. I was five years old. I remember standing up on Sunday morning and reciting my Bible verse in front of forty people. And I remember the coins in my fist that I stole from Mother’s change jar in the kitchen and walked down the alley between the rows of little white garages to 38th Street to the luncheonette.

A man held the door open for me and I said, “Thank you very much.” I had eighteen aunts and so I had very good manners. I climbed up on a stool at the counter, and the cook said, “What do you want?” and I said, “A cheeseburger with ketchup.” I put my 50 cents down on the counter. I heard a man a few stools away say “Goddamn it to hell,” which I’d never heard before in my life. The cook was smoking a cigarette, and the smell of tobacco smoke was new to me as well. He set the burger down on a white plate and I said, “But I wanted cheese.” And then I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Dad. He pushed the plate away and led me out the door. I said, “But I paid for it!”

Mother was waiting by our garage. She handed Dad a yardstick and told him to give me a whacking, but he could not bring himself to do it. He and I sat in the garage on the bumper of our 1941 Ford not looking at each other and after a while we went up the stairs to the kitchen.

The next day, Aunt Marion said to me, “I understand you like cheeseburgers” and she laughed and so did Uncle Bill. Aunt Elsie said something similar. My bad deed was amusing to them. My dad had told them the story, the “But I wanted cheese” line and “But I paid for it.” The story amused my family. They loved me. They never said so but if you could make them laugh, then you knew you were loved, it was just as simple as that. And so I took a turn toward comedy, all because my dad couldn’t hit me with a yardstick for stealing money, though it was a thin light yardstick, not a heavy one.

I was a very quiet boy, which back then people thought indicated a high IQ but I knew better. I knew I couldn’t be a teacher or doctor. I couldn’t go into sales either because I have a gloomy face, having grown up evangelical and thinking the world is about to end any minute and eternal hellfire awaits those who’ve strayed from the path (and which of us hasn’t?). A man with a face like mine can’t work in a haberdashery and hope to interest a customer in a fine suit; you’d be lucky to sell him a pair of black socks.

I went into radio when I was 18 to impress a girl I was in love with and found it easy work, no heavy lifting, no expertise required, you simply offered friendship to strangers and that became my career. I also was a writer but people bought my books because they listened to my radio show and were friends of mine.

Writing was hard because it’s never good enough and you can waste months going down the wrong road and a live radio show simply is what it is. The “On Air” light flashes and you do what you do. An evangelical upbringing is a weird preparation for comedy, but now I’m an old man and still working at it. I went home to Minnesota recently and I rode down Bloomington Avenue and it all came back to me. Had Dad thrashed me with the yardstick, he wouldn’t have told Marion and Elsie and it wouldn’t have become a joke and I likely would’ve become a drama critic known as The Mortician, famous for my devastating reviews with wicked put-downs that have closed many a show. Instead I celebrate my 83rd with a show telling stories and singing love duets with my pal Heather Masse. A cheeseburger costs twelve bucks and it’s worth it.

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A trip back home to reacquaint

The Delta jet landed at Minneapolis-St. Paul so lightly that it didn’t disturb my handwriting on a postcard — I wrote “I am coming to reacquaint” and the wheels touched down between the c and the q, no squish or squiggle. On the way out I saw the captain, slim, tall, neatly pressed, the picture of cool competence, and I said, “Beautiful landing” and he said, “Thank you, Mr. Keillor.” I love coming back to Minnesota where I was a local celebrity for a few years and where people still know me.

I never intended to be a celeb, I intended to be an important writer but I had a wife and child and needed to earn a living. So I did a radio show for forty years, not realizing what a beautiful thing it is to have people walk up smiling and say, “I know you!” and the doorman in the homburg at the Hotel St. Paul who asks how I’ve been and really means it or the woman in the lobby who walks up and says, “Would you mind if I give you a big hug?” and does.

Important writers don’t get this, unfortunately. They give readings of their work to college students who then try to ask intelligent questions about archetypes and allegory, but I take a walk around Rice Park and a man walks up like an old friend and we talk. He looks at the old federal courthouse with bell tower and turrets and tells me what he’s read about the trial — in that courthouse in 1936 — of Alvin (“Creepy”) Karpis, who’d been in Ma Barker’s gang who had kidnapped the local brewer William Hamm.

I miss these friendly encounters now that I live in New York where I’m anonymous, which I’m okay with but I enjoy coming back to Minnesota. This is minor celeb status, not when everyone in the room turns and says, “Oh my God, it’s Katy Perry” and a crowd forms and security has to hold them back, but when you walk around for a few hours and three or four people walk up and talk to you.

The next day I went to Rochester to the Mayo Clinic where a physical therapist led me through some squats and stretches, heel-and-toe stands, bird dogs, to improve balance, and I walked down the hall and a man said, “My parents were big fans of yours. They had all your tape cassettes. I remember long car rides listening to you.”

I apologized. He waved it away. “It kept them quiet. I sat in back and read.”

I haven’t listened to the radio in ages, wouldn’t know how, I enjoy silence. To me NPR is Fox News for raccoons. But I’m fond of my old listeners. I used to try to talk them out of their admiration but my wife told me how impolite that is so I don’t anymore.

I walk into the Mayo lobby where a man is playing Haydn on the piano and a friendly woman at the Information desk directs me to Cardiology. I headed for my echocardiogram, and was grabbed from behind by a woman who cried, “It’s you!” She told me her life story, said she’d had a heart attack, was unresponsive for three minutes, then revived, and now was delighted to see me.

I lay on my side for the echocardiogram and the woman attached the stickers and wires and leaned against me, moving the cursor over my chest, and after a while she said she had listened to my show as a child and remembered a story about ministers on a pontoon boat riding so low on the lake that it looked like they were walking on water. So I told her the story, the man on the parasail towed by a speedboat, him holding a bowling ball containing his grandma’s ashes, the speedboat rocking the pontoon so some ministers fall off, the speedboat stopping to rescue one of them, the man dropping into the water and then being towed underwater and losing his swim trunks, then flying naked into the air, and she laughed, while taking pictures of my heart and I hope the echo showed that it was quite full, how could it be anything else.

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What we learn from air travel

I grew up among Christian people in the Midwest, polite, soft-spoken, avoiding outbursts of anger, we only raged inwardly. We weren’t complainers. We knew we weren’t a great civilization like Greece, but their god Zeus was often violent, a god of thunder and lightning, liable to wreak destruction at any moment. We were gentle, as our God told us to be. We believed in an orderly world.

This all came crashing down last Monday night at JFK when I boarded a Delta flight to Seattle around 5 p.m. I consider JFK to be as close to a prison camp as I care to get. The Delta terminal is vast and crowded and ugly, endless lines at Ticketing, TSA agents whose badge entitles them to freely express hostility and contempt, miles of concourses lined with souvenir shops, the smell of bad food. Naming the airport for our late lamented president did him no service.

We boarded the plane and sat at the gate for a while, then pulled out and sat on the tarmac. A massive storm was moving east. The pilot came on the horn every 15 minutes to apologize for the delay and say that Air Traffic Control had no idea when, if ever, we might leave. Five became six p.m. and then almost seven when suddenly he said we were clear to go and the plane sprinted toward the runway but something changed, we were too late, and we returned to the gate canceled.

We spilled out onto Concourse B and got into a mighty river of canceled people heading for a Delta service desk and got into line. The line seemed to stretch a half mile and move about a quarter mile an hour or less. Complex negotiations were taking place far ahead. Word was passed down the line that Tuesday flights were selling out, that I might not reach Seattle until Wednesday. News passed that it might take hours to retrieve checked luggage. I saw some families with little kids looking for a friendly area to bed down for the night. Some older kids seemed to see it as an adventure. The parents did not.

I felt for them. You’ve taken the kiddos on a trip to the Big Apple to visit Grampa and Gaga and you saw Coney Island and the zoo and picnicked in the Park and now you’ve exhausted their hospitality and your credit cards are worn thin and you must face a night sleeping on the floor. The allure of travel ended a day ago and now you are in Alcatraz. Your children will grow up wanting never to leave their rooms.

I headed for Baggage Claim and here was a scene of emotional turmoil, a long line had turned into a mob facing three uniformed Delta ladies who had no idea where or when or if your luggage might appear. “It might be two or three hours,” one of them said. “If you’re rebooked, your luggage will be automatically routed to the new flight,” she said, but most of the mobsters had not been rebooked, they were New Yorkers who wanted to grab their bags and go home. “Give us your claim checks and we’ll have people look for them,” she said. Again, she said: two or three hours.

The New Yorkers could not accept this. She tried to explain that dozens of planeloads of people were in the same boat. It was a huge storm. You can’t fly into thunder and lightning. They didn’t buy any of this. It was a Greek drama before my eyes: women drawn to a career in travel and the prestige of a nice uniform facing a horde of murderous barbarians demanding the release of hostage luggage.

I am 82, a college graduate, an Episcopalian, a former radio broadcaster, the author of novels, essays, sonnets, and limericks, and my days of standing in long lines for hours ended long ago. If when I die I face a long line at the gates of heaven, I will consider alternatives. I left the terminal, got a cab, rode back to Manhattan, took an elevator to the 12th floor, opened the door, and crawled into bed next to my wife who recognized me right away as the love of her life. A man can ask for no more. Luggage became the last thing on my mind. Let God and my travel agent Camille find a way. I closed my eyes. There is no place like home. Think hard before you leave it.

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A Sunday walk in the park

It’s a beautiful summer where I am, hiking on Sunday with my beloved through Central Park among people walking their dogs, pushing strollers, apartment kids feeling their oats, and the separate dog playgrounds, one for lapdogs, one for hounds and mastiffs. A man selling fresh fruit under a big red umbrella. Bikes skimming along on the bike lanes, runners jogging or loping or shuffling along, and we emerge from the park at 72nd and head down Columbus Avenue to an outdoor café and find a table for two in the shade, and look at each other and the perfection of the day is utterly stunning.

The Grand Canyon is on fire and you wonder if the DOGE layoffs didn’t contribute to the extensive destruction, meanwhile the Playboy Prez visits the Guadalupe River valley and insults the grieving by comparing the flash flood to an ocean wave that surfers would hesitate to ride — the man’s inability to express genuine empathy or even imitate it is remarkable — does he not have a wife and children who can instruct him? Meanwhile, the woman I love and I sit eating salads and a baguette, at peace in the hustle and rumble of cityfolk busy enjoying their Sunday.

I admire journalists like Thomas Friedman, Susan Glasser, George F. Will, David Remnick, who focus their various lenses on the failings of officialdom and the fragility of our beloved country and set off appropriate alarms, even as they experience just such a perfect day as this, the park with its majestic oaks and maples, the watchful parents, the delight of toddlers, thousands of people pursuing happiness in the urban grid, each aware of the others, each encouraged and uplifted by the common goodness.

The country’s in the hands of a 79-year-old with serious memory issues who seems more interested in redecorating the White House than in foreign policy, who is perversely enraged by diversity and by universities as well as courtesy and insurgency, irritated by vaccines, fluoridation, windmills, civil rights, the progressive income tax, consumer protection, science and math, fact-based journalism, who intends to take us back to the McKinley administration and retreat from the larger world.

Odd to think that the Man came from this very city where, it’s safe to say, he could not be elected City Housing Inspector. Sometimes it feels as if the MAGA river is ebbing and then one of them writes in to accuse me of TDS, Too Doggone Smart, and I feel insulted that these good people have nothing better to do than read my stuff. Do they not have farm workers to expel? Hotel cleaners to lock up in the Everglades?

Perhaps we need to find a Democrat even more vulgar than the Florida Flatulence, someone not stuck in 10th grade Civics and the idea of mutual respect and compromise, but a big yahoo in a gorilla mask who’d challenge the Orange to 15 rounds in a ring, bare-handed, Madison Square Garden on national TV in bikini briefs.

The Florida Flat gained prominence by claiming Obama was born in Kenya, a brazen lie that appealed to many people, and the Democrat Flat could get some mileage out of challenging Mr. Maraschino to be tested for autism and a prevalence of feminine chromosomes.

But the national crisis fades in the perfection of this Sunday, walking hand in hand with the woman I love, heading home, back to the terrace where the mockingbird parents are feeding their two babies in the nest carefully hidden in the climbing hydrangeas on the wall, parents who stand watch, scritching at us monsters invading their space, making their irritation very clear.

I’d like to sit on the terrace and look out over the rooftops of Manhattan and watch the procession of planes descending toward LaGuardia but the mockingbird parents will not be ignored. They are seriously irked. We pay a hefty monthly maintenance fee for our apartment but the birds don’t care about that; they are about the preservation of life itself. Soon they’ll nudge Mickey and Monica out of the nest and coach them in flying and drive them away to make a life and maintain New York’s mockingbird population.

For me, the terrace is only for pleasure. To the birds, it means survival. So my love and I surrender it to them and come indoors. Life is good. Mother Nature has things pretty well figured out. Things conspire to make a perfect day. Don’t get in the way.

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The doctor said to keep going

I spent three days at the Mayo Clinic last week and found out that, for a person who doesn’t take care of himself, I’m in rather good shape. No aches or pains, no anxiety, not diabetic nor likely to be, no risk of colon cancer, skin looks good thanks to my dread of sunlight, heart sounds good, plenty of hemoglobin, and I have a lower percentage of body fat than two-thirds of men my age, and I probably shouldn’t brag about my prostate but I’m told it is soft and youthful. What more could one ask.

I was a devoted two-pack-a-day smoker for two decades, a dedicated drinker, thinking it obligatory for a serious writer, and I avoided physical exercise whenever possible. In a rare act of sheer will, I cut out tobacco and alcohol, and now, through no fault of my own, I feel limber and light and, for an old evangelical brought up on the flavor of brimstone, remarkably lighthearted.

I go to Mayo because it’s one of the cheerfullest places on the planet. People come here quite aware of mortality, and cheerfulness is the only way to regard mortality: life is a gift, so be grateful especially as you get up into dangerous octo territory. I feel congenial here, make small talk with strangers, hold the door open. People in blue scrubs smile at you, offer directions.

All forms of decrepitude and disability are here to be seen, and it’s touching to see the couples, one of them sitting and being wheeled by the other, old couples, some young ones, who were busy living their lives and then one started to falter and the lover became the caretaker. Each couple walks by and you see clearly the love between them, holding hands, an arm around a back — maybe the passion has waned, surely they had their ups and downs, but that’s all over now, now they are united. And then you see children, anxious, children in distress weeping, wounded, children with no hair, and it breaks your heart, you can see the pain in the parents’ faces, but even so, your pity is not what’s needed. Playfulness is good, a little comedy if possible.

There is a moral network here, a communal bond that I think no longer prevails in our country. Highly educated men and women dedicate themselves to improving the lives of people in need, some urgently. Honesty, competence, and kindness are prime virtues here, and the army of aides, receptionists, cooks, janitors feel a sense of higher purpose as well. Our country today is fascinated by a Nietzschean executive who lies, steals, cheats, and commits acts of pure cruelty on a daily basis, whose prime motive is personal vanity. Mayo serves a big slice of rural Minnesota so plenty of Mayo patients likely support him. There’s an interesting contradiction here. If this were the Trump Clinic, best service would go to the top bidders, others would go on a long waiting list, the poor would be given analgesics, and there would be enormous portraits of him in all the hallways.

To its expansive campus Mayo is adding a building devoted to Wellness, where you can go to be told what you already know: eat less, eat better, get regular exercise. But Dr. Will and Dr. Charley weren’t wellness people; they were surgeons and their Clinic pioneered great advances in surgery, which is what brought me here years ago.

I was out of breath, even standing still, and a doctor heard it, listening to me on the radio, and sent me here, and a couple days later I was wheeled into an OR where five intensely serious people in scrubs stood around the table, focused on the job at hand, and Dr. Orszulak sewed up my mitral valve, and ten years later Dr. Dearani replaced it with one from a pig, and so I was given some bonus years beyond what my relatives got who were born with the same heart defect I have. I think of this every single day. When your life is saved you feel an obligation to do something worthwhile with the gift. And so I try.

I want to create some beautiful hours with audiences across the country, including comedy, poetry, stories, and the whole crowd singing old songs in simple harmony. The best singing crowds, crowds whose harmonies bring tears to my eyes, are in red states that voted for cruelty. There’s a contradiction there. I’ll never understand it, neither will you.

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Me and Bob at Al’s Breakfast

People are always asking me if I know Bob Dylan, seeing as we’re the same age and both of us were at the University of Minnesota at the same time, and I’ve always said no, not wanting to get into the whole complicated story or claim any credit for his career. Dylan is a hard-working guy who deserves his entire $500 million fortune and the fact he never gave me credit for his name and never paid me back the ten bucks I gave him in 1960 at Al’s Breakfast diner is neither here nor there. He was sitting next to me, guitar on his back, eating two eggs over easy on hash browns with three strips of bacon and he said, “Hey, man, you got a ten on you? I left my billfold in my car and my girlfriend Elaine borrowed it to go pick up my suit at the cleaners. Soon as she returns, I’ll pay you back.

He looked like a nice clean-cut guy, pinstripe shirt with a turquoise bolo tie, blue Bermuda shorts, maybe too much Wildroot hair cream but what caught my eye was the Roy Rogers tablet he was writing on.

I’m a writer and singer

And I have prophesied now and again

On various topics wide-ranging

And I’ve written poetry now and then

That people have said was engaging

Some I thought I might send to a friend

And others I felt like changing

And some I would definitely recommend

And it’s time I got an agent.

 “Interesting,” I said. “I think you’ve got something here.” People often showed me their writing back then because I had a moustache and wore a denim jacket and a neckerchief and “I think you’ve got something here” stood up pretty well as response. It’s not a put-down but it also doesn’t encourage false hope and maybe lead them to waste years of their life. But what struck me was his signature, Robert J. Zimmerman. “If you’re going to be a singer-songwriter, you need a better name,” I said. “Zimmerman is a plumber’s name.”

I pulled out a copy of Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill” and said, “Anything there strike your fancy?”

“Robert F. Hill?” he said. “Or Bob Hill?”

“Bob Hill sounds too much like Bobble. How about his name?”

“Bob Thomas?” he said.

So I wrote it out in big letters: B-o-b D-y-l-a-n.

He said, “Hnnh. It’s too odd. And people’d pronounce it Die-lan. Like Dialin’ For Dollars.” And he wrote: Bob Dillon.

I said, “It’s too close to Matt Dillon. And when you’re a writer poet, Odd is to your advantage. Try it out for a few weeks and see how people respond to it.”

And then a tall woman with long black hair walked up with a jacket on a hanger. A tweed sport coat.

I said, “Elaine, I want you to meet Bob Dylan.”

She looked at him and grinned showing all of her teeth and gums except a couple back molars. “I like it,” she said. “It’s perfect.” And that sealed the deal for Bob, that big grin. He himself never cracked a smile, even a slight one; back then, songwriters didn’t. He reached for the jacket and I pulled his hand back. “A tweed sport coat people will take to mean you’re an essayist. Trust me. You want this.” And I took off my denim jacket and helped him on with it. I said, “Believe me, you’ll thank me for this someday.”

That was the last I saw of him. He forgot about the ten bucks and he never thanked me. His success is very simple. My generation was brought up on clichés and they were fascinated by a man who was diligent about being mysterious. He sang about the circus in town and painting passports brown and the blind commissioner in a trance with one hand in his pants and the riot squad needing somewhere to go and Lady and me on Desolation Row and when you devote yourself to meaninglessness you become fascinating and anyway it’s so much better than “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” and your love of the inexplicable sets you apart. People love puzzles, especially insoluble ones. And Bob had a great investment guy, Roland Stone, who put his dough into Monet, Renoir, and Van Gogh and Ohio Dynamo, but without me, he’d be a complete unknown in a trailer home without a phone. Now I’ve said it, you’ve read it, hope you get it.

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