Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 32

Sick in a hotel room, thinking back

I spent the weekend in Fort Lauderdale in a low-rent hotel with many families with small children and numerous college kids who seemed confused, even alarmed, when I got on an elevator and said, “Good morning” to them, as I was brought up to do but that was back in the 20th century. Every time I crossed through the lobby I heard Christmas songs like “it’s lovely weather for a sleigh ride together with you,” which strikes a Minnesotan as peculiar and then on Sunday I tested positive for COVID so I had other things to think about.

I have the good fortune to be related to a doctor. His father, my uncle, was a doctor, and ordinarily you’d expect a doctor’s son to pursue a radical new course, perhaps as a thrash-metal guitarist, but his upbringing was not traumatic enough to drive him in that direction and instead he devoted himself to caring for the unwell, of which, Sunday, I was one. I called, he answered, he phoned in an order for Paxlovid to a Fort Lauderdale pharmacy, and spared me a long miserable wait in an ER while doctors attend to serious injury.

I was scheduled to do a show Sunday night and I wanted to do it though I felt wretchedly ill. I was sure that hearing the audience laugh would make me feel better, but the venue has a No-Co policy in place, and I wouldn’t want others to catch my virus, so suddenly I was unemployed and far from home.

I was planning to tell the audience about winter in my childhood, when I rode a sleigh through blinding snow to get to school and the driver avoided the swamp where gangsters hung out hoping to kidnap children and hold them for ransom but nobody paid ransom because families back then were so large, ten or fifteen kids, because there was nothing else to do for six months so they bred for amusement. I was born an Olson but one day the sleigh was attacked by masked men and the driver whipped the horses and they bolted and they wouldn’t stop and I was dropped off at the Keillors instead, many miles away, and they already had eleven kids and I slipped into the family unnoticed because I was a very polite child and no trouble to anybody, and I was glad to become one of them. The Olsons were a shifty lot who talked nonsense and the Keillors were honest as the day is long.

This would’ve been a good story for the college kids to hear but of course they have no interest in listening to an old man talk about the 20th. To them, 1964 is next door to 1864 and the Civil War whereas to me it’s the year the Beatles arrived and after the bitterness of the assassination of President Kennedy the previous November and the rise of the old hack LBJ, the utter cheerfulness of the Liverpool skiffle band was so delightful, it caused euphoria among teenage girls, songs that said I want to hold your hand ’cause when you touch me I feel happy inside, it’s such a feeling that my love can’t hide, which I still feel about my sweet woman.

In my shows, if I sing “There are places I remember,” the audience joins in and sings all of “In My Life,” word perfect, and the same with “Who knows how long I’ve loved you” and “Well, she was just seventeen if you know what I mean,” the whole songs, with great pleasure, and though I don’t fancy myself a singer, I do it because it makes the crowd so happy. Amid the violence and political dysfunction and eco-crises of the 21st, the whole wretched legacy we leave to the grandkids, we recall a moment of light-heartedness before Vietnam descended on us.

I’ve had dark times in my life, mostly of my own making but I don’t recall them with any clarity, unlike the moment in 1997 I stood in the delivery room of the hospital and held a naked infant daughter in my hands and all the times I sang duets with my friend Heather, a tall woman, and we stood eye to eye, and she made me briefly sound almost like a singer, and the day in August I spent with my wife Jenny, just the two of us on the front porch of a little house on the bank of the Connecticut river, observing my 80th birthday. We drank our coffee, watching a family of foxes playing tag in the yard, talking a little, we held hands and so forth, but it was a beautiful day. I wish you kids the same.

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Winter is here, thank goodness, P.T.L.

Minnesota got a good dousing of snow this week but not the light dry sparkly snow that inspires jollity but the heavy snow that tangles up air travel and leads to delays and cancellations and you see ordinary sensible well-dressed people sleeping on floors at the airport, their heads on knapsacks, our friends and neighbors turned into homeless refugees. I was on a flight out of MSP to LaGuardia, which got delayed a couple hours due to 50 mph winds in New York City but people didn’t complain: the thought of dramatic turbulence, the plane bouncing and shaking, grown men grim-faced, agnostics praying devoutly, children excited by the roller coaster ride, as we descend low over a body of water, is something we’re glad to avoid. Pilots don’t use the word “turbulence” — I imagine company lawyers sent them a memo — they refer to “a few bumps” but we passengers know better, so we were in good humor as we unboarded the plane we’d boarded twenty minutes before and camped out in the gate area to await further developments.

I’m an old man and so the airport of today is fascinating to me. Believe it or not, I remember when we’d walk into the terminal and go straight to the gate to welcome Uncle Bud and Aunt Betty when they flew in on a propeller aircraft for Christmas. There were no metal detectors, no uniformed security searching your bags and yelling at you to remove your shoes; back then, TSA stood for Talk Softly Always, and now I come through a scanning machine and a government agent says, “I need to pat down your inner thighs.”

Ordinarily if a man said that to me, I’d report him to authorities, but he happened to be the authority and I didn’t want to take the Greyhound to New York so I succumbed to being patted down. He did it briskly, without any intimations of affection, and I picked up my stuff and put my belt on and headed for the gate to board and unboard and wait for clearance.

It was a very congenial wait. A fiftyish woman in a heavy parka spoke to me and asked me what she should do in New York. Minnesota women don’t speak to strange men and so this was a surprise and what was sort of amazing was that she took me for a New Yorker. I told her to avoid Times Square, to walk around Central Park and if she likes tap-dancing to see “Some Like It Hot” and hang the expense. She said she’d never been to the city before.

“Why now?” I said. She said she was going there to see her brother whom she hadn’t seen for eight years and try to reconcile with him.

It was a sweet encounter, one person telling a story to another, and somehow the snowfall and the travel delay played a role in it. There is nothing like the unexpected to bring out the best in people. I’m not the friendliest person you ever met but I smiled at people, said hi to people who said hi to me, and though I heard some grammatical errors, a plural pronoun where singular was appropriate, “lay” used when “lie” was meant, I didn’t correct them. If someone’s hair had caught fire, I would’ve used my cup of latte to extinguish it and not asked for compensation.

I sat by Gate C1 and considered maybe starting up a sing-along, maybe “Leaving on a Jet Plane” but then thought no, some women might resent singing “So kiss me and smile for me” with men they don’t even know, so I didn’t, and then we reboarded in a festive mood, ready for whatever New York throws at us. I feel sorry for Florida, which is devoid of snowstorms that promote fellowship.

Our snowbirds sit in a wasteland of parking lots and shopping malls and conversation dies for lack of anything to talk about. I feel terrible whenever I read about a Minnesotan eaten by an alligator that slipped out of the water hazard at the country club and attacked the guy in the sand trap and devoured him, yellow pants and all. A golf club is no defense against these beasts. There are 1.3 million gators in Florida and they’re attracted to aged Northerners because we use older brands of cologne that make us smell fruity. I’m heading for Fort Lauderdale tomorrow. Kiss me before I go.

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There’s money in dystopia but so what?

One advantage for us Christians of living in New York is that we’re a small minority just like in early A.D. living among Romans and Turks so we can’t lord it over people. We walk quietly. If schools avoid using the word “Christmas,” we understand. Children walk past, cursing like truckers. We ignore it. In places where Christians form a powerful majority, they can bully and persecute with great enthusiasm, even though our Savior instructed us in kindness and charity.

I speak as an old man. Righteous intensity fades with age. We spend too much time wringing our hands over evil. I no longer read stories about What’s-His-Name. There’s nothing more to be learned about narcissism. Fascism is not that fascinating.

I met a guy in the subway not long ago whose headphones I could hear twenty feet away. We were waiting for a downtown train at West 86th Street. He was about fifty, balding on top but with an ambitious ponytail. He wore a Metallica T-shirt, the one with a skeleton performing a brain operation with a fork and knife, eating the patient’s brains. I’d recently had a heart operation to replace a mitral valve with one from a pig and I thought he might like to hear about it but it was hard to make contact. We boarded the train and he turned the music off and I asked him, politely, what he enjoyed about Metallica. He didn’t hear me; I had to speak loudly and clearly. He said, “It’s very beautiful, no matter what people think.” I got off at 42nd to go to the library. He continued on, perhaps to an auto-crushing plant or a crematorium. Someday he’ll achieve deafness, and then perhaps he’ll become a reader and maybe he’ll google Metallica and find this column.

 

Hello, sir.

A person has a right to enjoy music about hopelessness, but when I look at some lyrics, suddenly the serial killings start to make sense.

Nothing matters, no one else
I have lost the will to live
Simply nothing more to give
There is nothing more for me
Need the end to set me free.

The kid who shot up the school in Texas, the night manager at the Walmart store who shot up his coworkers in the break room — it was about suicide and wanting the suicide to get attention. It’s sort of cheesy for millionaire musicians to crank out anthems to hopelessness — this isn’t the blues, it’s angry morbidity. But there it is.

I trust that you, sir, find some serenity in your silence. Perhaps you’ve taken up birdwatching. It’s a long way from thrash metal to thrushes and meadowlarks but the human imagination is capable of great leaps. I hope you’ve found someone to put his/her/their arms around you.

 

I went to the library that day and sat in the reading room, and I was the oldest in the room by far. Intense young scholars who I imagine may do the work needed to save this planet so that future generations can enjoy fantasies of violence if they wish. If the sea rises faster as the planet heats up, survival will take precedence over amusement. People will lose the liberty to be weird.

Two nights before, I had been in Palm Springs to give a speech and was reminiscing about the past and on an impulse I sang the words, “There are places I remember” and the audience sang the whole song with me. A thousand people knew the words to Lennon-McCartney’s “In My Life,” including the repeated last line with the high notes, “In my life, I love you more.” And then we sang “Silent Night,” all three verses. It brought me to tears, people united with strangers in beautiful works of art.

I wonder if, years from now, a crowd will sing Metallica songs for the pleasure of it.

The apostle Paul wrote to the Christians in Philippi, in Macedonia, to fix their minds on what is true and beautiful and I suppose they tried to do that, and eventually their city was destroyed by the Ottoman Empire and now, centuries later, the ottoman is just a footstool. The world changes and takes us with it. But the true and beautiful remains, more compelling than ever. Dystopia and mental distress are very much in fashion now and there seem to be no memoirs about a happy childhood, only trauma and displacement and broken hearts, and so be it. But comedy, which is a charitable deed, lasts longer. Knock knock. Who’s there? Metallica. Metallica who? Metallica doesn’t have a last name, it’s not a human, it’s abandoned.

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An old man thinking at the Thanksgiving table

I decided not to spend $700 for a seat at “Music Man” on Broadway though I love the musical and know most of “Ya Got Trouble” by heart and sometimes “Gary, Indiana” comes spontaneously to mind or “Lida Rose” or “Goodnight, My Someone,” so it’d be $700 well spent, but Broadway theater seats are too small for a tall person, and two hours of physical discomfort and possible knee damage is two hours too many. I have given up suffering in my old age. I don’t go to loud restaurants. I avoid political rallies. I don’t hang out with boring people or conspiracy hobbyists or people who use obscenities as punctuation. I don’t pay a large sum of money to be crammed into a space designed for children.

Aversion to misery is one aspect of aging and another is feeling oppressed by material possessions. Too many books, pictures, shirts, souvenirs, gadgets, and gizmos. I could go through my closet and dispose of two-thirds of it. All I need are some jeans, black T-shirts, a few white shirts, and about six suits. I’m from the Sixties generation that rebelled against the suit, trying out leather fringed vests, paisley cloaks and capes, psychedelic scarves, ethnic things, a cowboy look, hobo styles, but it was way too much trouble planning the right look every day — way way too much — and so I started to appreciate the suit, a simple dignified uniform that requires no thought about your current identity, you just step into it and go about your business, and if someone wants to read something corporate into it, that’s their problem.

Back in my leather fringed vest days, I assumed I would die young and become immortal like Buddy Holly or James Dean, but I was too poor to afford a fast sports car or a chartered airplane, and soon I was too old to die young. I survived absurd self-consciousness, cold winters, hard labor for no money, a fondness for whiskey — and now on Sunday mornings when I’m in town, I go to church, a traditional one that offers extensive moments of silence. “Be still and know that I am God,” it says in Scripture, and we do. God often speaks in the stillness. We confess to ourselves that we are not in charge of our lives and we believe that a Greater Power is in charge who loves us and we shake hands with the people around us and walk home.

Back in the day, I went to public schools and so did everyone else and we sat in a classroom with all sorts of kids, there were no special tracks for the gifted and brilliant, they had to sit next to us dummies. We all sang out of the same songbook, we loved the one about the E-ri-e is a-rising and the gin is getting low and Dinah in the kitchen and the spacious skies and the grasshopper picking his teeth with a carpet tack. People my age know these songs by heart. I spoke at a college convocation once for Parents’ Weekend and realized when I got there that the speech I’d written was crappy, a Dare-To-Be-Different message they’d heard often enough, so I said, “Let’s just sing some songs that we all know,” and I led them in those old songs and I saw kids holding up cellphones, googling “I’ve Been Working On The Railroad” because they’d been assigned to the Gifted Track back in fourth grade, which encouraged creativity and Daring To Be Different. The parents in the audience sang about Dinah and the land where my fathers died and “His truth is marching on” and roses love sunshine, violets love dew, and apparently enjoyed a sense of commonality that was denied to the gifted.

It’s a beautiful aspect of old age that you become more like other people than you wanted to be back when you were uniquely gifted. There is something about physical decrepitude and loss of acuity and a long memory and a sense of history that draws you together with kindred spirits. I often think of Leeds, Barry, Frankie, Corinne, my friends who died young, and wish they could’ve enjoyed old age. It’s worth the trouble.

I was the oldest person at our Thanksgiving table and I didn’t say much because the kids were so lively and funny and why bring them down with a lecture about the wonders of old age, including the fact that every morning is an occasion of gratitude. I’ll let them discover that for themselves, Lord willing.

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Walking a crowded street in Gratitude

It surprises me, a man of pen and paper, that Twitter requires regular maintenance and without the attention of veteran software engineers could easily crash leaving millions of twitterers to write notes on paper, and would they be able to write with a pen or would they need to cut words out of a book and paste them on paper to make sentences, the way kidnappers do in the movies? You’d expect the Head Twit, the world’s richest man, to be smarter than to drive his new acquisition into a bridge abutment, but who knows?

The crises of the extremely rich are entertaining to the rest of us, such as the billionaire addicted to inhaling nitrous oxide, which inspired him to think he was crystallizing. And Mr. Amazon who wants to go to the moon. And the ex-president guy who has been there for years. This gives us in the back of the bus some reassurance that vast wealth isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In so many critical ways, it’s good to be normal.

I know nothing about software. I use a laptop but nine-tenths of its capability is foreign to me; I use it as an educated typewriter. I love that it makes a squiggly blue line under misspelled words, even exotic ones.

I imagined Twitter was run by robotechnicians, no need for a company cafeteria, just a lube station, but apparently not so. There are human beings there and they have feelings, which is what the rich guy is inexperienced at dealing with. He knows about circuitry but he’s bought a circus and now hundreds of acrobats have quit.

You come to appreciate humanity, living in New York as I do. I walk down upper Broadway and it’s very amiable, like the Minnesota State Fair, throngs of people, the smell of pizza and hot pretzels in the air, bursts of music in passing, a general civility, all that’s missing are the farm implements and barns of giant swine. I’m a Midwesterner, wary of strangers, but walking in New York inspires a feeling that people are good at heart. Of course we’re all Democrats in this neighborhood. That’s all we have. You couldn’t find a Republican if your life depended on it. Thank goodness, the need for one has seldom arisen.

Last week I flew to Detroit and spent a couple days in a suburban landscape of strip malls, a church next to a used-car lot next to a Walmart and hotel overlooking a cemetery, vast acreage of asphalt parking, a landscape that if I hiked a few miles along the main road, I’d feel isolated, threatened, and after dark, it’d be terrifying.

I descend into the New York subway, an institution that is often grieved over but still packed with people taking great care not to bump each other or maintain eye contact for more than a few seconds. I’d rather be on the subway than drive my car through suburbia trying to find a shopping center; I’d slow down to try to get my bearings and the car behind me would honk with real fury. I’ve never encountered fury in the subway. It’d be too scary so people avoid it.

We’ve all experienced a strong centrifugal urge to find loneliness in the woods, a cabin, a beach house, a tent on an island, and I’ve been there and done that and found that silence makes me uneasy and that the presence of birds and small mammals does not constitute company. Hermitude was not appealing and in the fall I heard gunfire and imagined a headline: Writer Slain in Cabin, Sheriff Asks Public for Clues.

So now I am pleased to be in a subway car jammed with people. There’s no other city where you can see so much of America at once as here. The sheer variety is fascinating. The woman with the three small children opposite me: the sight of them speaks to my heart. The tall young woman in the black leggings whose stone-faced expression says she’s tired of people admiring her classic beauty, which, face it, is stunning, but I respect her need to be ignored, I look away, but the image of her is memorable.

New Yorkers feign indifference, but if you should fall down, people will come to your assistance. If Mr. Musk tripped on a curb, people would stop and bend over and ask, “Are you okay?” They wouldn’t say, “I closed my Twitter account you idiot and you know something? I don’t miss it!” He’s human and if he’s injured himself, we’d help him up and call 911, same as we would for you.

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Thank you, thank you, thank you

I come to Thanksgiving in a cheerful mood, counting the blessings, starting with the new pig valve Dr. Dearani’s team sewed into my heart three months ago, which enables me to type this sentence and saves some poor soul from eulogizing me and getting it all wrong. My legacy is that I sang gospel songs and told immature jokes on public radio and thereby took up arms against pretense. “There was a young man of Madras” and “How Great Thou Art,” I love them both dearly. It horrified thousands of managers and vice presidents but I got away with it.

As a Minnesotan, I’m aware that my state is the No. 1 producer of turkeys, an ugly ill-tempered bird with a sharp beak and a single-digit IQ and no redeeming qualities except the meat. Minnesota used to produce computers and semiconductors but then Apple and Microsoft took the business away, and now our state produces 45 million turkeys a year, which means that in early October, there is a possibility that the birds could rise up and take over. We have only six million people, many of them elderly and easily confused, and if a strong westerly wind hit the penal ranches and the fowl panicked and a feathery wave swept east toward the cities and the National Guard assembled a wall of snowplows along I-35 and the stampede flowed over the mountains of carcasses and ten or fifteen million birds hit Minneapolis, late-night comics would feast on us and my state, which gave you Prince and Robert Bly, would be a joke.

And then there’s the GPS lady in the dashboard who leads us through mazes of 18th-century streets in New England towns and there are no more of those “I told you to turn left” arguments. And Google, which lets you type in “Now thank we all our God” and it gives you “With heart and hands and voices, Who wondrous things has done, in Whom this world rejoices; Who from our mothers’ arms” and so forth. And YouTube, where “Going to the Chapel” and “Under the Boardwalk” and “Sugar Sugar” and all the hits of my youth are instantly available when needed, no need to rummage through the 45s. And my WordPerfect software that makes a squiggly blue line under “Leviteracetem” until I correct the spelling to “Levetiracetam.” (My old Underwood typewriter didn’t care one way or another.)

And then I think of the phone call I made in 1992 to the sister of my sister’s classmate. I had called her, at the classmate’s suggestion, six months before to invite her to lunch and she said she couldn’t, she was going on tour with an orchestra in Asia. She was excited about going to Indonesia, Brunei, and Malaysia, which she hadn’t seen before, and I was impressed and wrote her number on the wall and six months later called back. We had a long lunch at a seafood joint on Broadway at 90th and so at the age of 49 and three-fourths I found a partner for life.

She was a freelance violinist in New York, living in a walk-up apartment on 102nd, a woman who loved her work and endured the vicissitudes of freelance, namely the occasional poverty, and never asked help from family. I was a successful writer. I lived in a little bubble, isolated, chained to a computer, a veteran of two unhappy marriages to women I made even unhappier. She was an inveterate walker who on her tour of Asia had ventured alone into strange cities, climbed hills to see temples, braved the language barrier. In New York, she kept her spirits up through penurious periods by walking six, eight, ten miles a day around Manhattan, Central Park, museums, living on crackers, cheese, and coffee.

I tried to impress her, bought box seats at the opera, took her to classy restaurants, and of course she enjoyed that, but what she liked most was good conversation. She was endlessly curious. I told stories about my evangelical upbringing, about the writing life. She is very honest. She is a hugger and my friends and family like her better than me (I’m a shoulder patter). She loves people. She’s adorable. I’m lost without her.

There is an old man in New York
Who is cheerfully popping the cork
In sheer thanksgiving
For the pleasure of living,
Thanks to Jenny and a small piece of pork.

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What Mozart did for me last week. Thanks, Amadeus

I went to a play on Broadway this week, a matinee, and was impressed by the usher in our aisle downstairs who was elaborately kind to everyone, managing a stream of elderly customers confused by row numbers, pointing them to seats while maintaining pleasant small talk, reminding them to turn off their phones, directing them to washrooms (downstairs) or to the counter that offers hearing devices, handing out programs — his competence was stunning and dramatic — and he did it against the clock and never was caustic though he had a right to be, dealing with the dither.

As for the play, I guess it was trying to be a tragedy but there was a good deal of O MY GOD WHERE ARE THE CHILDREN overacting and professional actors trying out their Euro accents, working to make their part GRIPPING and the silences MEANINGFUL and after half an hour I checked out and thought about other things.

The rest of the crowd was working hard to appreciate the play because, though dull, it was rather dark and so people around me watched intensely as if this were Drama 101 and afterward we’d divide up into discussion groups and they wanted to think up intelligent things to say about the threat of fascism in our own time, and not just “I didn’t care for it” but I felt no need to be the smartest person in the audience, failure holds no fear for me, I’ve been there repeatedly, so I checked out of the play and thought about Mozart.

The night before the play, I’d gone to a concert with a Mozart violin concerto in it and found it astounding, the lightness and gaiety, the brilliance of the playing, the sheer beauty Mozart put in the hands of the soloist, and all this in the 18th century when a cruel aristocracy sat on thrones, abysmal poverty was the rule, men were hanged for thievery, and people perished miserably from the ignorance of infection and antiseptics.

Mozart was sick for a great deal of his life, suffering smallpox, pneumonia, rheumatism, typhoid fever, his wife Constanze agonizing over him, and died at 35 but it was his gift to create beauty and to entertain. People are still laughing at the jokes in The Marriage of Figaro. The violin concerto I heard was joyful and the violinist made it clear that he loved it too. He was finding expressive freedom within a strict form, the best of the 18th century brought to the 21st.

Fall is all about mortality. The leaves are falling, the sky is gray, winter is coming. Fall has inspired countless men to suffer a fatal attraction and quit their jobs, leave their families, and run away with Rhonda Rainbow and enjoy an ecstatic week in a Best Western and be dumped and die of an overdose of toilet bowl cleanser. I know good men who were teenage football heroes and sacrificed themselves for the glory of Central High on autumn afternoons and now, thanks to numerous concussions, sit in a locked ward and watch golf tournaments on TV.

I was saved by physical cowardice. I never went in for shoving, never threw my body against someone else’s except in the case of a few women and then very gently after asking permission.

The play ended and the audience gave it a standing ovation of course and I put on my coat. The usher stood by the door, thanking people for coming, wishing them a pleasant day, and also pointing out a treacherous step and preventing them from falling and crashing headfirst into the brick wall and suffering a hematoma and winding up in the ER with drunks and lunatics. I don’t remember much of the play but I remember his kindness. I wonder if he’s maybe an unemployed actor who’s thrown himself into the ushering role and found his true calling.

Mozart had a right to share his suffering with us by writing music that makes us sick but instead he was an usher, directing us into a joyful realm of playfulness in which we become happier than we had intended to be. And he gave that violinist the chance to be so brilliant, we brought him back for three bows. Then we got a cab and resumed the struggle. I went home and worked on my stand-up act for New Jersey Saturday night and did 90 minutes and everyone left happy. Me, too.

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Once again, Violetta does the right thing

We went to the Met to see La Traviata on Election Night and so did many other people and the Violetta was delicate and pure and commanded the stage right up to when she died and Verdi’s choruses were glorious and moving and he gives Violetta some heartbreaking unaccompanied passages, a lone soprano singing in the extensive acreage of the Met, it takes your breath away. Of course some people won’t recognize great art even if it tap-dances in the nude while handing out Eskimo bars but I tell you the truth, Act 3 was so stunning it took your mind completely off Herschel and Dr. Oz and Kari Lake and the doctor running for governor of Minnesota who doesn’t believe in immunization.

For months I’d been getting pleas for money from candidates besieged by evil and now I wanted to see the courtesan Violetta living in sin with Alfredo whose father begs her to leave him so Alfredo’s sister will not suffer shame and can marry, and the courtesan agrees, a sinner performing an act of charity, sung by soprano Nadine Sierra who is also a Lucia, Zerlina, Susanna, Gilda, and for all I know may be a D.A. in Atlanta.

I forgot about the election entirely, which was why I was there. I didn’t check my phone during the two intermissions. With my wife, who has played violin in many Traviatas and loves the music, I walked through the lobby appreciating the costumery of the patrons. The Met is where imagination can run free and women can dress up as wealthy courtesans or Fifties movie stars or the queen of Albania. A woman walked ahead of us in a white sheath covered with shards of broken glass. It was dazzling. (It looked like broken glass but of course I didn’t reach out and touch it.) I was dressed like an accountant, my wife like a violinist. I asked her if she’d wear a dress like that and she said, “If you wanted me to, I’d have to leave you.”

We left the Met in a daze and went back to the apartment and found out that the disaster predicted by columnists for months had not quite materialized. Oz was defeated in PA and sent back to NJ, Herschel must face a runoff in Georgia and the Minnesota guy was beaten satisfactorily, and Kari Lake was behind in Arizona, and so democracy apparently would survive for another two years and we head toward Thanksgiving feeling grateful.

I am grateful for the Met. Our tickets were expensive, close to what we’d pay to fly to Milwaukee, but I don’t know anybody in Milwaukee so why would I go there? And if I did, I’d only be in a fit over the reelection of the blowhard Ron Johnson.

As a baritone, I’m grateful that Verdi wrote a great baritone part, sung by Luca Salsi, playing Alfredo’s father pleading with Violetta to leave the man she truly loves, arguing for respectability, which we baritones tend to do. I do. I have heard elegant young women on Columbus Avenue talking like angry truck drivers and wanted to approach them and say, “Obscenity is so lame. Try being witty, it’s more destructive. Also more memorable.”

I’m grateful for the woman wearing broken glass. Maybe in the rich patrons’ lobby there was a woman in a spray-on dress or a dress made of Post-it notes or a man in a wedding dress. These people serve as proof that we’re at an opera in a major city, we’re not at an accountants’ convention in Topeka.

I’m grateful for the violinist who came home and went to bed with me. When I met her thirty years ago was when I started going to operas. She was a freelance New York musician who’d only seen operas from the orchestra pit, looking out of the corner of one eye while watching the conductor with the other, and I needed to make an impression quickly so I bought box seats and took her to dinner at the Café des Artistes with murals of naked women on the walls, and I made witty conversation, and then I took a deep breath and gave her a book I’d written.

We didn’t talk politics back then. I was in love. I didn’t care if she were a socialist, a monarchist, anarchist, or violist, I loved her company, and I still do. Life is good. The dough I paid for opera tickets in 1992 was the best investment I ever made, me, the guy in the dark blue suit, red tie.

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An idea, probably wrong, but it’s an idea

I’m thinking I should get to work on a museum of the era before the internet and cellphones and streaming music so that people under 40 know what it was like to talk on a phone with a cord on the kitchen wall and gossip without your mother understanding what it was about. People wrote on stationery with a pen back then, not a stationary bike but paper, wrote letters in a cursive hand to their grandmas and Grandma told you what fine handwriting you had. Now Grandma is happy if you stick with your birth gender and don’t get tangled up with fentanyl.

I’m not nostalgic for those days, I simply feel that you young people need to know some history. When I was 20, 60 years ago, I walked into the Capitol in Washington one evening and there was one cop sitting at a table inside the door, reading a book. There was no metal detector. Nowadays, they put up metal detectors at the doors to elementary schools. I’m not kidding.

Back then, you could learn a lot about people by looking at what they were reading on the bus — the New York Times, Guns and Grenades, Christian Digest, whatever — and you could strike up a conversation with them, based on a perceived common interest — “I don’t know what to make of the House Ways and Means committee lately” or “I have a friend who owns a bazooka just like that one” or “I’ve gone back and started rereading Ephesians, there’s so much there” — and now they’re wearing headphones and you have utterly no idea. It could be Alex Jones, it could be Steve Bannon, it could be Franklin Graham. I go to my cousin’s for dinner, I don’t look at their bookshelf the way I used to: if I see Mein Kampf, I don’t want to hear him say, “I was only curious” or “It’s what our book club is reading.”

Back then, you had to pay money for sheet music to learn the words to songs and I couldn’t afford it so for years, listening to the radio, I thought it was “You make me feel like a rash on a woman” and “He’s got the whole world in his pants.” Imagine. Back then we said things like “He really shot himself in the foot” without stopping to think that many people actually have blasted a hole in their foot, whether accidentally or on purpose, and the damage that is done, the breakage of bones, infection, plus the embarrassment that follows you all your life, and it’s real and harmful.

And now I realize it is possibly offensive of me to imagine this is worth a museum, to honor a time when there was zero affirmative action and women were held back. Songs like Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” which infantilizes a woman and “Great Balls of Fire,” which glorifies testicles. And four Brits who hit the big time with “I Want to Hold Your Hand” — well, what does She want, the woman the song objectifies, does she want her hand to be held, does she feel happy when he touches her, why don’t we hear about that?

It’s wrong of me to say this, and I apologize, but it seems to me (wrongly, I’m sure) that we were a teeny bit less self-conscious back then. Not that that is a good thing, but it’s true. We tiptoe around these days, careful not to say the wrong thing, like say “gone viral” in front of someone who caught COVID or “hot spot” in front of a menopausal woman. Meanwhile, one of the most admired men in America lies like a rug, cheats, commits crimes openly and encourages treason and insurrection, and is ranked as Most Admired by about 20 percent of the American people. Is there any connection between the beginning of this paragraph and the Most Admired part? I’m only asking.

I’m glad I lived when I did. I saw the last living veteran of the Civil War, Albert Woolson, riding in a convertible in a parade. As a boy drummer, he played at Lincoln’s funeral parade in Washington. He looked at me; I could’ve reached out and touched him. I also saw the Rolling Stones play at a hockey rink on their first American tour. To you kids, they’re just billionaires but they were young and hot, they looked great on ice. I won’t lie to you — Albert Woolson wasn’t there but I think he would’ve been amazed at Charlie Watts’s drumming.

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My thoughts after being cut down by a tree

A beautiful October of golden days and fabulous autumn colors and behind this scrim our beloved country appears to be moving toward white nationalism and putting our trust in dominant males who speak in short sentences rather than the confused and conflicted Democrats. Republicans have scored marvelously in depicting the opposition as weak on crime, flaccid on the economy, a radical elite who would imprison parents who do not affirm the gender choices of their children. An Orwellian vision of children sent to state-run indoctrination camps as the first step in a Cultural Revolution that will replace Christianity with wokeness.

I don’t care about Orwell. I had a good weekend. I went walking around Central Park and the sun was in my eyes and I banged my head on a low branch and crashed to the ground and within four seconds five people stopped to make sure I was okay, which, thanks to them, I was. I went to church Sunday and we sang “This Little Light of Mine” to a Latin rhythm and though we’re Episcopalian we got very happy and clapped along. I came home and got engrossed in reading Emerson, a writer I never liked before, who wrote, “Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year and this time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.”

Nothing sells so well as anger and resentment. Anger moved people to burn other people at the stake, whereas hope is the stuff of Get Well Soon cards that we pitch in the trash. Hope is a cup of chamomile tea; resentment is a double bourbon. Everyone has disappointments and worries about the future and sometimes a person can imagine the country is about to crack at the seams, and up stands a conservative who says the liberal elite has opened the Mexican border for hordes of South Americans to flood the country, go on welfare and breed children who’ll be U.S. citizens and in twenty years Congress will conduct its business in Spanish with English subtitles. So you vote for him because Democrats only talk about the complexity of things, which makes your eyes glaze over, whereas he accuses them of drinking the blood of small children, which naturally attracts attention.

The real threat to parents is the internet, which offers a vast array of temptation and turpitude undreamed of back in my childhood. It troubles me to see eight-year-olds running around with cellphones and teens sitting glued to screens. I wish they could have a childhood like mine, but that was then and this is now. You can burn books; you can’t burn radio waves.

If America wants a Congress who’ll impeach Mr. Biden and replace him with a presidentissimo who declares martial law, then we’ll just have to make do as best we can. I believe I will head for rural Minnesota, somewhere near Freeport or Melrose, and buy an old farmhouse surrounded by woods and move in with all my books and LPs and a stereo, leaving my laptop behind, and live as I did fifty years ago, reading Chekhov and Emerson and I.B. Singer, listening to Mozart and Fauré and old Broadway musicals. If I lived in New York, I’d be aware of the government every day, but out in the sticks I’d be free to be ignorant.

I could move to Canada but the national anthem is unsingable, the bacon is round, not in strips, they have five political parties and two languages, and there is no clear northern border, the country simply disappears under the Arctic ice cap. No, I’ll take Midwestern mannerliness and amiability. I’m tired of reading about QAnon and Machiavellian conspiracies. Let the guys with the tattoos and AR-15s and face paint take over for a while and wage government by graffiti. The pandemic gave us a good education in the beauty of isolation. They say you can’t live in the past — well, I beg to disagree. There’s a reason the classics endure: they’re good. Emerson speaks to me still. He said, “This new day is too dear to waste it on the yesterdays.” He was a great American enthusiast. “When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.” If America wants government by resentment, then let’s try that for a while. Okay? Call me when the credits roll.

 

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