Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 30

Father Time advises a brown-eyed girl

I had a good conversation Saturday with a college student named Emily, a rare pleasure for an old man like me, most of my social life is spent with geriatrics eager to talk about their most recent hip replacement, but Emily talked about her ambition to go to law school and to devote herself to the issue of prison reform.

A bright articulate idealist from a good family who entertains noble ambitions that nobody in my age group would consider for two minutes; we’re done with nobility ¬¬¬— when we were her age we sang that deep in our hearts we believed that we would overcome, but instead we got good jobs and hung out with cool people and were overcome by piles of stuff we couldn’t bear to part with and now we just hope not to fall down in the street and bang our noggin against a curb and lie there gaga and be hauled away by EMTs who’ll never realize what an illustrious person we used to be and not this gibbering mess on the gurney. And we’re hoping to get a decent obit even though our illustriousness ended when most obit writers were in the third grade. The surest way to get a great obit is to be in the arts and die before 40 and it’s too late for that.

Prison reform is a truly noble cause because there is no political constituency demanding it. Every time I fly into LaGuardia, I look out at the hellhole of Rikers Island, a prison right out of Dickens’s England, where men languish who are unable to make bail and life is brutal, and the Democratic hacks of New York won’t touch this issue lest they be thought weak on crime. Emily knew all about this, and she nodded.

And if you take on prison reform, then you need to reform our broken mental health system that was destroyed by my fellow liberals forty years ago as “deinstitutionalization,” the idea that rather than enormous hellholes, you put the inmates in small hellholes where we wouldn’t be so aware of them. Emily knows about this too. And whatever progress you make will be painfully slow: nobody will come up with an algorithm to produce social justice.

When you take on a noble cause that’s a steep uphill climb and that brings you into conflict with bullies and bureaucrats who will make you question your faith in human goodness, you need to protect your own soul and not get ground down by weariness and despair, and what I recommend is that you take up dancing, particularly Latin dancing.

There is a whole subculture of Latin dance, people devoted to the tango, samba, salsa, mambo, meringue, because when they go out on the dance floor and do complicated steps, it makes them happy, no matter what. After a day of beating your head against the world’s indifference, go find a salsa class and work your way up toward the tango, and as you improve, you’ll find that your body in sync with the music can bring you delight.

I once gave a graduation speech at a school for special-needs kids and afterward there was a dance in the gym and I stood and watched the students file in, kids we used to call “handicapped” and now we say “learning challenged,” kids on the spectrum, some with physical oddities, glitches of speech, and I remembered how cruel and callous we were to kids like these in my high school days. It was not considered cool to befriend them — what if one of them wanted to dance with you? — and they sensed this so they never went to school dances.

And now a local rock band made up of geezers my age tuned up and launched into “She’s So Fine” and the kids went crazy for it and “Surfin’ USA” and Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl” and we elders sang, “Do you remember when we used to sing, Sha la la la la la la la la la de dah, my brown-eyed girl, and in that blessed moment, the kids lost all their self-consciousness, they were running and jumping, dancing, they were all equal in the eyes of the Lord and of each other. It was euphoric. It made me cry.

Emily, God bless your idealism and the hard work required, but there has to be joy too. Nothing good can be accomplished without joy. I think Emerson said that. If not, he should’ve.

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Father time advises a brown-eyed girl

I had a good conversation Saturday with a college student named Emily, a rare pleasure for an old man like me, most of my social life is spent with geriatrics eager to talk about their most recent hip replacement, but Emily talked about her ambition to go to law school and to devote herself to the issue of prison reform.

A bright articulate idealist from a good family who entertains noble ambitions that nobody in my age group would consider for two minutes; we’re done with nobility ¬¬¬— when we were her age we sang that deep in our hearts we believed that we would overcome, but instead we got good jobs and hung out with cool people and were overcome by piles of stuff we couldn’t bear to part with and now we just hope not to fall down in the street and bang our noggin against a curb and lie there gaga and be hauled away by EMTs who’ll never realize what an illustrious person we used to be and not this gibbering mess on the gurney. And we’re hoping to get a decent obit even though our illustriousness ended when most obit writers were in the third grade. The surest way to get a great obit is to be in the arts and die before 40 and it’s too late for that.

Prison reform is a truly noble cause because there is no political constituency demanding it. Every time I fly into LaGuardia, I look out at the hellhole of Rikers Island, a prison right out of Dickens’s England, where men languish who are unable to make bail and life is brutal, and the Democratic hacks of New York won’t touch this issue lest they be thought weak on crime. Emily knew all about this, and she nodded.

And if you take on prison reform, then you need to reform our broken mental health system that was destroyed by my fellow liberals forty years ago as “deinstitutionalization,” the idea that rather than enormous hellholes, you put the inmates in small hellholes where we wouldn’t be so aware of them. Emily knows about this too. And whatever progress you make will be painfully slow: nobody will come up with an algorithm to produce social justice.

When you take on a noble cause that’s a steep uphill climb and that brings you into conflict with bullies and bureaucrats who will make you question your faith in human goodness, you need to protect your own soul and not get ground down by weariness and despair, and what I recommend is that you take up dancing, particularly Latin dancing.

There is a whole subculture of Latin dance, people devoted to the tango, samba, salsa, mambo, meringue, because when they go out on the dance floor and do complicated steps, it makes them happy, no matter what. After a day of beating your head against the world’s indifference, go find a salsa class and work your way up toward the tango, and as you improve, you’ll find that your body in sync with the music can bring you delight.

I once gave a graduation speech at a school for special-needs kids and afterward there was a dance in the gym and I stood and watched the students file in, kids we used to call “handicapped” and now we say “learning challenged,” kids on the spectrum, some with physical oddities, glitches of speech, and I remembered how cruel and callous we were to kids like these in my high school days. It was not considered cool to befriend them — what if one of them wanted to dance with you? — and they sensed this so they never went to school dances.

And now a local rock band made up of geezers my age tuned up and launched into “She’s So Fine” and the kids went crazy for it and “Surfin’ USA” and Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl” and we elders sang, “Do you remember when we used to sing, Sha la la la la la la la la la de dah, my brown-eyed girl, and in that blessed moment, the kids lost all their self-consciousness, they were running and jumping, dancing, they were all equal in the eyes of the Lord and of each other. It was euphoric. It made me cry.

Emily, God bless your idealism and the hard work required, but there has to be joy too. Nothing good can be accomplished without joy. I think Emerson said that. If not, he should’ve.

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A pleasant night with nice people in L.A.

I left the snowy paradise of Minnesota Saturday and flew to sodden L.A. where heavy rains are making hillsides slide into the canyons and arroyos, which is not a problem on the prairie thanks to our canyonlessness. The land does not slide on the plains unless you are very very drunk and then you go to a Unitarian church basement every Tuesday night and talk with your fellow AA members about your emotionally distant father who drove you to drink.

Most Minnesota fathers are distant emotionally and many others are physically distant, those who divorced your mom and married Bambi the cocktail waitress based on an emotion that took him and her to the mobile home park near Miami where he now sits and drinks. I am emotionally distant except sometimes in church or when I eat a toasted sesame bagel or when my sweetie walks into the room and sits on my lap. She is not emotionally distant at all. She married into my family of crusty evangelicals and when they reach for her hand to shake it she throws her arms around them, and as a result their puritan principles are sliding like a hillside. Which brings me back to L.A.

I earn my living these days as an affirmative speaker. People could go hear a lecture on the coming water shortage in the Southwest or they could go hear stand-up comedy about bad boyfriends and Kevin McCarthy or come hear me tell you that life is pretty good and could be worse but even if bad things happen there is a great deal of kindness in the world, even in places you’d never expect it, such as Texas and Florida.

It all comes down to plumbing and electricity. If water comes out of the tap and the toilet flushes and the coffeemaker lights up when you press “Brew,” you’re pretty much okay. A half-million executive directors could disappear and nobody’d notice but if you can’t reach the plumber, you’re sunk in despair.

The news media are in the business of merchandising Worst Case Scenarios. But then so was Shakespeare. When you go to see “Macbeth” or “King Lear” you don’t expect them to sit down and work out amicable solutions. Hamlet is even crazier than Ophelia and no pharmaceuticals are going to help them. I’ve seen “Hamlet” twice and don’t need to see it ever again.

When you get old, you’ve heard as much bad news as you need to know and now that mortality is tapping at your door, you should cheer up and spend your twilight years hanging out with people you really really like and eating food you love and spending your children’s inheritance on nice hotels and not Airbnbs with other people’s underwear under the bed. When the big coronary hits, you don’t want to be in seat 21D squeezed in between college sophomores, you want to be up in First Class where you’re more likely to find a cardiologist who can hit your chest with the heel of his hand in a way that startles the ventricles into pumping again.

Back when I went on the wagon in 2002, I told my sweetie that in twenty years I’d take up pinot noir again and maybe graduate to Armagnac but I’m not going to do it. I’ve been experiencing some short-term memory loss such as standing in the kitchen with a spatula in hand and forgetting what I was going to do with it. After a glass of pinot noir, I might forget what the thing in my hand is called, and it would be embarrassing to ask my wife, whose name is Jenny. I’ve already forgotten what a reflexive pronoun is and I couldn’t define “subjunctive mood” if you were to put a loaded .357 Magnum to my head, so I want to maintain my remaining memory.
The Magnum was the comic-strip detective Dick Tracy’s pistol back when I read the comics, but now I read the Times, which abjures comics in favor of long articles about drought in the Southwest.

I met some of my L.A. audience after the show, all of them overachievers, aware of the various crises we face, and probably nobody had told them for a long time that life is good and they seemed pleased to consider this. They thanked me. Good. It was my pleasure. Thank you.

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A trip to Minnesota last Tuesday

 

I flew back to Minnesota in the midst of Tuesday’s snowfall and was proud of my people dealing calmly with snow. The media tries to make a crisis of weather and newscasters speak in emergency tones and verbs such as “struck” and “slammed” are used. Falling snow never “struck” anybody. An icicle may have or a snowball or someone might slip on ice and strike their head, but snowflakes descending have no more impact than falling leaves in autumn.

The blizzard that fell on Buffalo was entirely different, four feet of snow, high winds, twelve-foot drifts, icy roads, deadly temperatures, combined to create a refugee situation and Buffalonians responded with mass heroism, people taking strangers into their homes and feeding them for days until order was restored.

The media loves drama, of course: they’re writers and who wants to write about contentment? Nonetheless, it was a shock to hear the words “potentially dangerous storm” applied to the snowfall in Minnesota. I come from an era when school was never ever canceled and we children stood in blinding blizzards waiting for the bus to come, huddling together like sheep, and thank goodness we wore heavy winter clothing with scarves, long underwear, stocking caps, masks, breathing through our noses to avoid freezing our lungs, and reminding ourselves over and over not to put our tongues on a lightpost.

We had been warned not to by our mothers, who told us that our tongues would freeze to the iron and firemen would have to come and rescue us and we’d probably talk with a lisp for the rest of our lives and so be unable to seek a career in broadcasting, and of course this warning aroused in us an urge to go ahead and do it. The romance of self-destruction, the longing for victimhood — it’s a long chapter in American history — look at all the alcoholic authors, the children of wealth and privilege who turned to heroin, the addiction of intelligent people to downhill skiing, the grooming of young people to take up wilderness camping.

I was a camp counselor one summer and I remember eating wretched food in a cloud of insects, some of which carry dreadful diseases, and sleeping on stony ground, feeling the onset of constipation, thinking about snakes and tall trees that fall for no reason in the middle of the night. Only two great novels involve camping, Grapes of Wrath and Red Badge of Courage, and in neither book is camping done for pleasure. No Beethoven quartet or Van Gogh painting or Shakespeare sonnet was inspired by a week of camping. Because camping is about boredom. It’s a refugee experience. When I first met my wife, I noticed that she wasn’t wearing hiking boots and didn’t have a lanyard around her neck and didn’t smell of insect repellent. It was a good start to a fine romance.

I drove south Tuesday on Highway 52 past peaceful farms on the snowy prairie, everywhere I looked was an idyllic picture, and I wondered why anyone in their right mind would trade this crystalline paradise for a tiny condo between a strip club and a casino in a sea of parking lots and Burger Kings with drunken college kids urinating in the streets in the south of Florida. It goes against good judgment.

I moved to New York but I’m still a Minnesotan and I come from the era of genuine winter, not the warm global winter of today, and back then Scoutmaster Einar insisted on our troop camping out in the woods in January, back before the invention of modern insulated sleeping bags, when we boys made our own out of Army blankets pinned together, and the only way we survived was by sleeping in a pile, three deep. Einar slept in his car and we could’ve joined him there but we didn’t.

I’ve told this true story to numerous people and nobody believed me, which convinced me to switch to writing fiction, but there it is. They also don’t believe that my mother warned us against putting our tongues on iron poles. That era has passed and now mothers worry about gender fluidity and adolescent depression and the fact that kids don’t know the words of the national anthem. Call me old-fashioned but I think a week in a tent in winter would straighten everyone out and we’d leave the wilderness to the animals and keep people in nice hotels with flush toilets and hot showers and room service. Try it, you’ll like it.

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Merry Christmas

 

 

 

 

 

LIGHT OF THE STABLE (Watch)

 

A little girl is singing for the faithful to come ye

Joyful and triumphant, a song she loves,

And also the partridge in a pear tree

And the golden rings and the turtle doves.

In the dark streets, red lights and green and blue

Where the faithful live, some joyful, some troubled,

Enduring the cold and symptoms of the flu,

Taking the garbage out and keeping the sidewalk shoveled.

Not much triumph going on here—and yet

There is much we do not understand.

And my hopes and fears are met

In this small singer holding onto my hand.

Onward we go, faithfully, into the dark

And are there angels hovering overhead?  Hark.

December 15, 2022 – St. Louis, MO

I did my old radio show at the Fox Theater in St. Louis last week though it’s long gone from radio, and even after all these years there were several firsts. Dean Magraw played electric heavy metal guitar for Heather Masse (in the role of Thistle Missile, star of a band called Progressive Disaster) to sing a metal lullaby:

Shut up and close your eyes

Or I am gonna traumatize

You so bad you’re gonna be

Twenty years in therapy

I’m an outlaw mama. yes

I can cause you great distress

Close your eyes and go to sleep

Or you will be in trouble deep.

Tim Russell impersonated three presidents in close order (Clinton, George W., and Barack) and Duane’s mom (played by Maria Jette) was happy spending the holiday in Florida and sang, drunkenly:

O holy night, the stars are brightly shining,

This is the nigh I’m in Fort Lauderdale.

We’re going out for dancing and dining.

And afterward we may go for a sail.

We sang “We three kings of Orient are, tried to smoke a rubber cigar, it was loaded and it exploded,” and Fred Newman did the vocal explosions that shook the theater. Maria also sang the story of Rudolph the reindeer to the tune of “Musetta’s Waltz.”

As for me, I got to sing duets with Heather, which I love to do and (if I do say so myself) I hit some beautiful high harmony notes on “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and Greg Brown’s song “Early,” notes that I didn’t have the day before in rehearsal.

But the high point was the audience. During intermission and again at the end of the show, they stood and sang in acappella harmony, old Christmas carols and knew all the words. All three verses of “Silent Night” including “Shepherds quake at the sight” and “Son of God, love’s pure light.”

After the two-hour twenty-minute show, the cast and crew stood backstage congratulating each other. I asked Dean if metalheads would recognize the riffs he played and he said, “Some of them.”  I told Heather that, for me, singing with her was the highlight of my career. I meant it. And the next morning in the hotel café, I met people from Nebraska, New Orleans, South Carolina, who’d flown in for it. And then we all flew home. I’ll always remember the sweetness of that “Silent Night,” sung by two-thousand people, believers and unbelievers, and those three minutes were the beginning of Christmas.

And now there’s talk of doing PHC again in Chicago, Atlanta, maybe New York again.

A blessed Christmas to all.

Garrison

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A hike to Times Square and back

The enemy is clutter and I am late to the battle, not wanting to be prim and proper, but I have bags and boxes stuffed with stuff, drawers, shelves, closets, and this must be addressed, otherwise you’ll be reading about me in the paper, Elderly Author Starves in Home, Unable to Climb Over Piles to Reach Kitchen. I exaggerate but the trend is clear and trends that are not interrupted become landslides. Meaningless memorabilia, clothes we’ve outgrown, mysterious tools, ugly art. So I start tossing and then I come across a note from my daughter: “I love you, Show Boy” and of course I can’t throw that away, and so it goes to a pile of saves, along with a sheet of paper with one-liners ( “She was only a stableman’s daughter but all the horsemen knew her.”). And a picture of my classmates standing on my lawn for our 60th reunion, which prompted me to call up Billy Pedersen who’s in the picture, and because my wife was asleep, I slipped out of the apartment and so there I was, walking down Columbus Avenue and reminiscing about our friend Corinne and the toboggan hill behind her house and thus housekeeping was put off for another day.

It’s Christmas, after all. Lighten up. Give yourself a break. — That’s my feeling. My mother didn’t teach us about a strict St. Nicholas who would judge us children and leave a lump of coal in the stockings of kids who’d not met the mark; she accepted the jolly old uncle St. Nick who wished to fulfil our dreams and desires, the one that Clement Clarke Moore of New York wrote up in his poem. The Swedes and Norwegians back in Minnesota came from people who believed in the nisse, the elf who needed to be bribed with a bowl of rice pudding and it needed to be sweet and creamy and up to his standards and even if it was, he might, out of pure meanness, leave ashes under your tree.

Three versions of Santa: judgmental, generous, or a jokester. The generous Santa is the saint of retail Christmas and the Calvinist in me sees him as a judge but these days I’m leaning toward the jokester — it’s the Santa who makes sense to me. I had a good job for fifty years that kept me amused and involved no meetings around a long table discussing long-term goals and required no math and no social skills on my part, and I married a kind and funny woman who is skilled at reading instruction manuals and jiggering appliances to make them work. And five months ago my leaky mitral valve was replaced by one from a pig and it is working very well. I am one of the undeserving blessed — my rice pudding was an instant microwave pudding in a box and the nisse was feeling bloated from heavy creamy puddings and my 2 percent skim struck him as a relief and so I won the prize of an easy life. That’s my position and I’m sticking to it.

I take the B train down to 42nd Street thinking I’ll go to the library but instead I walk through Times Square where the crowd gathered on the 31st to watch the lighted ball drop. I stand on the corner where Broadway slices at a steep angle across 44th and Seventh Avenue and I can look up six different canyons of brilliant flashing signs and along the
sidewalks rivers of people moving along.

And then it comes back to me, the memory of Times Square in 1953, I was eleven, on a trip with my father. My mother made him take me. It was the trip of all trips — the towers of Manhattan silvery in the afternoon sun and I had my father all to myself for the one and only time in my life. He’d been stationed in the city during World War II, sorting mail at the post office. He was talking about the wonderful time he’d had, a man in uniform, theaters letting him see shows for free, and I wandered away from him in this Square and he ran and grabbed my hand, afraid of losing me, and I remember this clearly — knowing that my dad loved me. He’d never say it, of course, but he did.

I stand for a moment, stunned by the memory of him pulling me back, and then the light changes and I head for home.

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Working my way toward a philosophy

I had a dream last night in which I was a stand-up comic and I trained a dog to move his lips as if saying words and I stood in the wings and told jokes synched to him, jokes about dogs (in the first person) and the audience loved it so much, to see a dog tell jokes, that when I came out on stage they were disappointed and wanted the dog to come back and even booed me. The lesson here is: there is such a thing as Excessive Success, which only leads to high expectations that cannot be met.

This surely was true of Sir Walter Raleigh, a poet, soldier, Queen Elizabeth’s boyfriend, who sailed up the Orinoco in search of El Dorado and failed and came back to London to be accused of treason and thrown in prison and have his head chopped off, a warning to the rest of us: don’t rise too high too fast. But as he himself wrote:

“Even such is time, which takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, and all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust.”

One day you’re a handsome dashing poet and pal of monarchy and the next day you’re a city in North Carolina.

Barack Obama suffered from unrealistic expectations, the first African American president, he was expected to usher in a new golden era, and look what happened. Meanwhile, Michelle Obama, in the role of FAAFL, kept a low profile and when she emerged as an author, she dazzled millions.

I know writers my age who decades ago were praised by the New York Times for a book that was “dazzlingly erudite and lavishly layered, bold and riveting and exquisitely crafted” and they haven’t written anything since, whereas the warmest praise I ever got was “amusing but often poignant,” which leaves plenty of room for improvement. So I keep trying to rise above poignant amusement to something lavishly layered and thus my morning passes happily. Don’t hit your peak too soon, is my advice. Don’t be afraid to disappoint.

I begin every day with low expectations thanks to a showerhead in a former house, a nozzle calibrated so that a two-centimeter turn took you directly from Arctic waterfall to fiery lava. You had to stand under the showerhead to adjust the knob so you stepped into this shower like you’d step onto the gallows, not sure if you’d perish by ice or by fire. Thanks to the memory of this instrument of torture, I begin each day with the hope of showering without being scorched alive and leap out of the shower, slipping on wet tile and displacing a couple discs and entering a long painful journey from chiropractor to orthopedic surgeon to a mystic named Sister Melissa who uses crystals and whispers solipsisms.

This hope is fulfilled — we moved to an apartment with a shower with two knobs, one hot, one cold, and there’s no problem, and you can adjust the spray to Deep Massage, Scattered Showers, or Wistful Mist. The shower is pleasant and uneventful and from that I proceed to a day that gets better and better.

I believe in life getting better. I grew up in a Sanctified Brethren home with a plaque over the breakfast table that said, “Jesus Christ the invisible guest at every meal, the silent listener to every conversation.” Which I found frightening, the idea of divine surveillance — it certainly didn’t encourage jokes — it encouraged false piety, even though we know that God looks on the heart and can tell a fake. From there, I walked to school where bullies ruled over the playground. They’d tie my shoelaces together when I wasn’t looking. They’d throw water at my crotch so it looked like I wet my pants. These scenes are still vivid in my mind.

None of that happens anymore. There’s no repressive plaque over the table and nobody ties the shoelaces of a man my age. I live with a woman who can read instruction manuals and put things together and who doesn’t mind when I drape my arms around her and whisper endearments.I do standup but not with a dog. In school I was given the nickname “Foxfart”. Nobody has called me that since back in the Eisenhower administration. This is what I consider real progress.

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A perfect Christmas, a man among woman

I got an orange, a book, four bags of jelly beans, and 12 pairs of bright red socks for Christmas, which warmed the cockles of my heart, plus which I was a lone male with three fine women companions so I didn’t need to say a word, just an occasional murmur to indicate I was paying attention. Had there been another male present, I would’ve had to talk learned talk about the economy or other topics about which I’m ignorant, which I did enough of in college and now it feels good to put a lid on it and listen to the music of contrapuntal contralto conversation.

We have no need for big gifts, being in the deaccessioning stage of life when we sit down at our big round clunky table and wonder how to divest ourselves of the thing, which was imposed on us by an interior decorator whose enthusiasm for massive ugly expensive furniture ground us into submission, we Midwesterners unable to self-advocate, so we feel we’re living in his apartment, not our own. If anyone wants the table, we’ll pay you to take it away. (It’s big so bring a chainsaw.)

Peeling my orange on Christmas morning was an enormous pleasure. It took me back to my childhood living room, the big tree lit up, it’s 5 a.m. and my brother and sister and I are emptying our stockings, our parents still asleep upstairs. Dad thought Christmas was ridiculous and also contrary to Scripture, Mother loved it dearly, and sometimes they came to a clash over it, which ended when she burst into tears and he put his arms around her. Strong feeling won out over correct theology — this made a big impression on me as a kid. As E.E. Cummings wrote, “Since feeling is first, who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you.” Our Christmas depended on the fact that Dad couldn’t bear to see Mother cry.

She came from a family of thirteen and when she was seven years old, her mother, Marian, died of a blood infection, and I imagine this contributed to Mother’s love of the festival of light and gaiety amid the dark realities of life. Every year she strove to make it absolutely perfect, the tree, the gifts, the stockings, the dinner. I feel tired just remembering how hard she worked.

My beloved made meatballs with mashed potatoes and gravy, cucumber salad, and lingonberries, in memory of her elegant Swedish grandmother Hilda, and she told us about the pleasure of visiting Grandma in Minneapolis and watching her unbraid her long hair and brush it at night, sitting in her white nightgown, and the little girl crawling into Grandma’s bed for the night. Grandma’s sister Jenny — for whom my Jenny was named — came to visit, and they spoke softly to each other but when they argued, they did it in Swedish. They were immigrants and their vocabulary of contentiousness was in their first language, not the second.

In the kitchen the women talked about grandmothers and Christmases past and memories of European travel, particularly Prague, and I was okay as a silent listener. I’m an old radio guy, and it’s a luxury to let other people do the work.

We’re still in pandemic mode and sitting at the big round table I wonder if the dinner party will ever return to our lives. I used to enjoy being the host and once cooked a Christmas dinner for ten, an enormous goose plus lamb for the goose-averse, presiding over the hubbub, glasses raised, a plenitude of food and everyone talking at once.

So I sit by our tree and put on a pair of red socks and eat a handful of jelly beans and I dream up a guest list for an imaginary Christmas dinner, writers I knew, Jim and Betty Powers, Bill Holm, Molly Ivins, Jim Harrison, Ada Louise Huxtable, Carol Bly and her husband Robert, John Updike, all of them gone, some of them with sharp edges, and I make goose, potatoes heavy with cream, mince pie. And I bring out a 1927 port wine and we taste the rich harmoniousness of life. Great minds in a state of contentment. We are walking through the valley of the shadow of death and we fear no evil. It’s bitterly cold but the cold draws us close together. My knees hurt from the 24th when an arctic wind blew down 90th Street and I stumbled on a crack and crashed to the pavement and three seconds later a guy helped me up and put an arm around me and walked me across Amsterdam. “Are you sure you’re okay?” he said. I am quite sure.

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A miraculous evening on Sixth Avenue

I’ve been reading Christmas letters this week and — I don’t know how to say this politely — back where I come from, Minnesota, it is considered shameful to be shameless and write a promotional brochure about your over-achieving children — “Tara was top scorer on her soccer team and won the lead role in ‘Antigone,’ and her essay on chaos theory will be in the next issue of American Scholar. She and her partner Maria whom she met in Trigonometry and who is Phi Beta Kappa from Pakistan are engaged to marry in June and plan to start a family when they move to Cambridge to start grad school.”

Probably I am all wrong about this. Probably I am simply defensive about my own slovenly habits. Probably I am envious, having never excelled in anything other than humility. I hit a brick wall in lower algebra and never got to trig. And now I’ve brought home a pitiful misshapen Christmas tree for which I paid $90. I was sent out to purchase a tree and I brought home a cripple. I had to go out and buy a special orthopedic tree stand with lead weights so it won’t fall over.

My beloved tries to reassure me that the tree is “just fine,” that Christmas is about spirit, not décor. I hate this sort of reassurance. It simply confirms my inadequacy. Other men went tree shopping two weeks ago when the first loads had arrived in New York from Quebec and they got dibs on magnificent ten-footers and negotiated the price down to $50. I am inept at negotiation and I paid full price for this embarrassment.

And I haven’t yet found a Christmas gift for the love of my life. She says, “I don’t need anything, I have you,” which I take to mean, “Anything you buy me I’d just have to return so don’t bother.” I should take out a mortgage on the apartment and go to Tiffany’s and buy her emerald earrings but, knowing me, I’d be accosted by a gentleman outside Tiffany’s who’d offer me emeralds for twenty grand, half what Tiffany’s charges, and I’d buy them and they’d turn out to be from Woolworth’s.

What to do? I wrote her a sonnet one Christmas years ago and she was touched by that but now I am even more stunned by her beauty and brilliance and don’t think I could capture that in a poem.

And then yesterday a miracle occurred, not on 34th Street but on 50th, at Radio City Music Hall. My love and I and our beautiful daughter took the C train down to see the enormous perfect tree at Rockefeller Center and to see the Christmas Spectacular with the Rockettes. Thank goodness I married a capable woman. She guided us from the subway up to the line forming for the 5 p.m. show and steered us through the Art Deco lobby to our seats (which she had bought) in mid-orchestra, and the duo-organists started playing and the light show began and I felt swept away by Christmas.

I’m from Minnesota. I’m a Christian. I was brought up to be suspicious of glitter and glamor and to prefer simple sincerity, and the Spectacular is New York showbiz glitz from beginning to end, a full orchestra in the pit, the 36 Rockettes doing their classic routines between which Santa rollicks around and there’s a 3-D video and a Nutcracker skit and a thrilling video of Santa and his sleigh flying through the canyons of Manhattan and around Miss Liberty and there are angel drones and then the Rockettes come out on a double-decker bus that goes racing around city landscapes. There’s a brief and utterly irrelevant Nativity scene, with camels and sheep, and then the Rockettes return for a finale, tall long-legged young women who have mastered trigonometric routines while tap-dancing and doing high kicks in unison.

I should’ve been repelled by this. It goes against my principles. I’m a man who goes to church on Christmas Eve and weeps as we sing “Silent Night.” I loved the whole thing with a whole heart. We exited and an usher said softly to me, “Merry Christmas,” sincerely, and I wanted to hug her.

We came home. Our daughter went to her room to FaceTime her friends. My love sat on my lap and we looked at our tree and she said, “I love you so much” (to me). It’s about cheerfulness, dear friends. God bless your house and all those whom you love. Be kind. A child is born.

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Waiting for Christmas, wishing for snow

I flew from St. Louis to New York City last Friday, had a cup of black coffee before takeoff, which put me right to sleep, and awoke on the descent through heavy overcast, no visible lights below even as our wheels were lowered, and down, down, down we came as the ride got bumpy and then sort of turbulent, lights appearing a few hundred feet below, a river of headlights on a freeway, the plane shaking as the ground came up to meet us, red lights on the tarmac, and the wheels hit and the nose came down and he reversed the engines and braked hard and brought us around to the terminal at LaGuardia.

It was thrilling. For all the times I’ve ridden a plane descending through zero visibility, it still is a pleasure, to contemplate the end of my life and then life continues, I text my love (“Landed”), take my briefcase, thank the captain standing in the cockpit door and walk up the Jetway and past Starbucks and the ATMs and the candy stand and out the door into the dark and drizzle and stand in the taxi line and hop in a cab and into Manhattan we go, down dark streets of brownstones, a few hardy souls walking their dogs, and across the Park to the West Side where my love waits for me to come through the door and puts her arms around me.

I wish it would snow. St. Louis was cold and bleak but Minnesota got a good snowfall and when snow falls in Manhattan, it’s magical, you’re in an O. Henry story about Christmas, and all the kids shut up in apartments come out with sheets of plastic or cardboard and go sliding on whatever slope is available and there’s jubilation for a few hours until it all turns to mud and slush. New York, snowless, is more John O’Hara, even us teetotalers feel sort of hungover.

But life is good, especially after your plane doesn’t crash in the warehouses of Queens and you are not in the news the next morning but are at your computer, writing comedy. It’s a story about a heavy-metal singer named Thistle Missile who sings a lullaby to her children:
“Shut up and close your eyes
Or I am gonna traumatize
You so bad you’re gonna be
Twenty years in therapy.
I’m an outlaw mama, yes.
I don’t promise happiness.
So grow up strong, be a smart aleck,
Because life, believe me, is metallic.”

She is out to revolutionize the metal community by introducing feminism — I love the phrase “metal community,” the story has real possibilities, it’s fun to push it along but I have no ambitions for it whatsoever. This is a beautiful aspect of getting old, you enjoy the work but success is of no particular importance, it’s good enough to be useful. I still do shows and maybe I’ll work Thistle Missile and her band Dire Outcome into one of them.

I keep working because fear of death is not a good enough reason to stick around; a person needs a purpose. Grandparenting is an excellent one, so is learning, but mine is writing. Dr. Dearani and his surgical team worked for six hours six months ago to replace my fluttery mitral valve with one from a pig and what a dreadful waste if all that expertise simply led to another decade or two of watching TV and sitting on a beach in Florida. It’s my duty to make their work mean something.

Among the Inuit people, it was once customary for an old man who couldn’t earn his keep to take the long walk across the ice and not come back. In my youth, when the elderly couldn’t do the yardwork, they were packed off to a little apartment and when they couldn’t climb the stairs they went to Happy Acres to die of boredom. My mother lived to the grand old age of 97, which gave me time to try to make up for all the grief I’d caused her.

My goal now is to do octogenarian stand-up for a few years and when that gets to be a struggle, I’ll come home and serve as a family historian. Most of my younger relations have zero interest in this but some do and my cousins Susie and Elizabeth are ready and willing to tell them about Thomas Keillor’s voyage from Yorkshire in 1774 and the Crandalls who supported the King and had to flee the Revolution and Grandpa who chased Dora Powell who ran away but not so fast that he couldn’t catch her. Ask and you will be told.

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