Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 33

I am an orphan and an officeless man

I miss having an office to go to. I had friendly colleagues and employees, and we were in the entertainment biz so we got to work with a lot of lulus and lunatics and we kept flexible hours and laughed a lot. I liked that we were in the business of making serious people split a gut. I also liked getting dressed up for work in a suit and tie, which you need to do when you’re involved with frivolity. Now I go to work in my pajamas at the dining room table. I don’t know if “clothes make the man” but I know that pajamas do not make the man. They make me feel like going back to bed.

I loved walking in the front door in the morning at 9 a.m., the way the receptionist straightened up and smiled, the electric anticipation among the minions that the captain was on deck, the ship was about to sail. I don’t sense that same excitement in my wife when I walk into the kitchen in my pajamas. She says, “Your hair is standing up like a rooster’s and I think you should check your left nostril.”

At the office, I was the Decider. I sat at the end of the table and I told the staff: “No more singing dogs on the show and the one tuba player who played ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ is enough: no more. I think we need a midget shot from a cannon and an acrobatic couple who work with two Percherons. And I say you can never have too many cat jugglers. The guy we booked who could keep six in the air simultaneously was a genius. Pay him whatever he asks.”

My staff was a bunch of college grads who thought in terms of jazz, folk, poetry, the arts, and didn’t understand the entertainment biz. They didn’t know raison d’être from a box of raisins. Art is art. You see a woman in a tutu swanning around, you think, “Everyone is so quiet, this must be good, I should be deeply moved.” You hear a folksinger do a traditional labor ballad, you feel like there’s going to be a quiz afterward. But you hear a man recite Allen Ginsberg backward while balancing a banana on his nose, and he finishes with “generation my of minds best the seen I’ve” and his pants fall down, you are stunned and delighted. And that’s entertainment. Now the biz has been taken over by angry millennials who’re out to use entertainment to make people feel wretched about themselves for the social injustices they failed to prevent. That’s why I left.

One of my favorite acts was a full-blooded Arapaho named Joe who danced and sang and twirled ropes and for a finale, he stood looking in a hand mirror at the stooge sitting fifty feet behind and he threw a tomahawk over his left shoulder and knocked the toupee off the stooge’s head without drawing blood. People protested this as stereotyping and we had to cancel the act. How could it be stereotyping when Joe was the only guy who could do it without mishap?

I produced the show every week, sitting in a little office, no credenza, a photograph on the wall of me and Marcel Marceau, the famous French mime, except he wasn’t French, he didn’t know a word of French, that’s why he was a mime, he was from Pittsburgh and he did great jokes about Unitarians but they attacked him as insensitive so he turned to mime, which was very sensitive to the deaf.

I could feel the biz changing when my staff booked a stand-up who walked out and said, “You came here to laugh and be entertained, right? Well, guess again. I’m going to talk about the plastics you people use that are making this world uninhabitable.” He spoke for twenty minutes, no laughs, and got a standing ovation at the end. I resigned the next week.

So now I sit at my kitchen table, still in pajamas at noon, and the other day I found my talent as a musical flatulenteur. I ate an onion, grabbed my ankles, and farted “Malagueña” with enough left over for a few bars of “Chopsticks,” which you could never do today because it’d be insensitive to Hispanics and Chinese, but still, it’s a gift and I’m grateful for it.

Garrison Keillor © 09.29.22

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Suddenly it’s clear why I wanted to be old

I look at the Great Milky Way
While inhaling the autumn bouquet
At eventide
And am mystified
And simply don’t know what to say.

I love this September chill in the air. I love sweaters. They hide the age wrinkles on my inner upper arms. A stocking cap means I don’t have to comb my hair. Delicate souls are yearning for Florida and maybe catch a temp job as a consumer influence consultant, enough to pay for a condo with a pool, but not me, I’m not into influence and Florida brings out the bad taste in people and nobody wants to see an old man in a thong bikini. So here I am. I like the coffee here. I’ve figured out how the shower works and no longer stand under scalding water because I turned the wrong knob; I don’t want to go to Florida and stay in a motel with a crank for a shower knob and be burned alive while naked. So I’ll stay up North. Here I take a shower, wrap a towel around me, walk into the bedroom and sing, “O my love, my darling, I hunger for your touch.” In Florida, I’d go to the ER.

The air is golden, smelling of wine and apples and woodsmoke. It takes me back to when I was 15, sitting in the press box and covering the football games for the Anoka Herald, my first paid writing job. And when I was 18 and a girl and I lay in a pile of leaves and made free with each other. Now I’m 80, the sky so clear I can see vast constellations, standing in the yard, aware of the universe and also smelling the rich spongy earth below my feet. An eternity of stars above, including stars that no longer exist but their light still comes to us, and I stand here in mystification, having unlearned so much of what I thought I knew about life, achieving this plain peasant life. It’s a second childhood. Someone told me the other day that “racecar” spelled backward is “racecar.” Amazing. This is why I quit drinking and got my mitral valve replaced, so I could see beyond the average life expectancy and it’s quite worth the wait, to live in a state of wonder.

Writing prose is a form of gardening, which my dad was good at, especially strawberries and asparagus and tomatoes. Store-bought tomatoes tasted like cardboard to him. (Now they taste the same to me.) My aunts Josephine and Eleanor were passionate gardeners. If my essays were as good as their cucumbers and lettuce, I’d be a major success, but frankly I like being a struggling octogenarian up-and-comer. People show me deference because I walk with a cane, and that’s okay, but I live in a very small world. My heroes are dead, my ambition is quite awake, I don’t believe in tragedy anymore, I believe in mystery.

I am mystified by my grandson and what an excellent human being he has become. He is a bulwark and an inspiration. I had two grandsons but the other one took his own life one afternoon after school. He was a lively inquisitive boy in love with all of nature, especially animals, and had the ability to retain practically everything he ever read, and he’s been gone for five years and I haven’t accepted his death. I will always be mystified by it, as I am by my childhood friend Corinne who paddled a canoe out onto Lake Cayuga one moonlit night in 1986, her pockets full of rocks, and overturned it and drowned.

It was thirty-six years ago but still vivid to me, especially tonight. Memory is tied to smell and on a September night chapters of life return to mind, unbidden. I’ve forgotten most of the books I ever read. Theology is of no use to me. I’m a child; I believe “All things work together for good to them that love God.” As a boy I used outhouses and now I walk into a men’s toilet and pee in a urinal and step back and it automatically flushes. I walk around with a device in my pocket the size of a half-slice of bread and I can call my grandson for a report on Gen Z or read the Times or do a search for “Success is counted sweetest by those who ne’er succeed. To comprehend a nectar requires sorest need.” It’s a sweet world. My beloved sent me out for a walk and here I am, going nowhere, looking at everything all at once.

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Tempted to give up politics for Parcheesi

My mom admired FDR and Eleanor because they cared about the poor. My dad felt there was no such thing as a Depression, that anyone who wanted work could find it, that the WPA was relief for the lazy, We Poke Along. He maintained this view even after we pointed out that his first real job came from his uncle Lew who owned the Pure Oil station in town. Their difference of opinion never got in the way of their love for each other. Politics was far away; real life was up close and was all about family. Sometimes I’d find her sitting in his lap, the parents of six kissing. He was a little sheepish, she was not.

Sometimes I envy my parents’ close-up life. I sit every morning, a hard-hearted man scanning my email inbox, fending off the pitiful pleas of political candidates in tight races, falling behind with the fate of democracy itself in the balance, the future of the planet, but we’re losing (unthinkable!) to a weird opponent who believes COVID is a covert conspiracy of drug companies and is financed by tycoons who plan to relocate on Mars, the good candidate is only asking for a $10 contribution, he pleads, and I snip them off one by one, along with the fabulous 50% OFF THIS WEEK ONLY offers, and an African orphanage asking me to buy a $500 Apple gift certificate and forward it to this address to save kids from starvation. Out they go.

I’ve donated to candidates and so my name has been furnished to other candidates of similar stripe and soon I’m getting appeals from city council candidates in Candle Creek, Colorado. But now and again I detect a human voice in the appeal that touches me and I check the $50 box and move on.

It’s rare that elections can be bought. Two years ago, Democrats found an articulate female Marine combat pilot to run against the despised McConnell in Kentucky and she milked angry Democrats for $94 million and he beat her easily. Money down the drain.

What were they thinking?

Two-thirds of the voters ignore the campaigns and simply vote as they’ve always voted and among the third who are capable of switching, there is powerful sales resistance, a built-in bushwa detector. Everything candidates spend in the last month is wasted: minds are made up, the audience is sick of the whole shebang, they’ve left the building. Money helps imprint your name in the popular subconscious but it does very little for your message. What counts is militant organization and also a rare quality among candidates — you see them and you realize that they actually LIKE campaigning. Hubert Humphrey had that joie de campaign and so did Paul Wellstone and Al Franken. People voted for them who didn’t exactly agree with them. So if you have that ebullient drive and you have some dough in the bank and you’re willing to say the same stuff over and over for a whole year and you don’t have an angry girlfriend in the closet or a 90-day sentence for abusing your sheepdog or a video of you speaking admiringly of Richard Nixon, you stand a chance. But a truckload of money isn’t going to rescue a sinking ship.

The biggest Election Night for my mother was 2008. She was 93. Dad was gone. We sat up late, TV on, looking at the big empty stage at Grant Park in Chicago, and then there was a roar from the crowd and Barack and Michelle and the two little girls walked out and Mother put her hands to her eyes, overwhelmed. With the appearance of that little family came the feeling that the country had cut loose from our dark racial past.

But it was too good to be true. The man set out to reform our wasteful, inefficient, infuriating health care system and he was expertly parried by McConnell and held to a draw and in 2016 Democrats nominated a woman for whom campaigning was a miserable chore and so in came the casino man who won reelection but was cheated out of it, despite what the courts said, and now we have Republican candidates refusing to say they will accept the results in November if they go the other way. This is the point at which we break with reality. Next stop is Happy Acres where we listen to the buzzing of the bees in the cigarette trees by a great big soda fountain. I’m not prepared to go there yet.

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What was so remarkable about Monday

Nobody does royal funerals so beautifully as the Brits and an American watches with awe the long procession toward the chapel at Windsor Castle, the precision left/right stroll of the Grenadiers alongside the hearse, the horsemen behind, the bemedaled notaries and royal descendants and then, having come through narrow arches into the courtyard, the hearse stops, the rear door opens, and the eight uniformed pallbearers do a side-shuffle march to take hold of the coffin and lift it to their shoulders and take it up the steps. No simple task but they do it precisely and a stately silence prevails except on TV where American reporters venture speculation about a woman whose job was to be a mystery and who did it very well.

We sat and watched the committal service, we who threw all this away in the 18th century, all the costumery, ribbonry, and titlery and iconic disciplines and endless dignity, in favor of the mess we know all too well. The mind goes back to the funeral of George H.W. Bush in 2018 at Washington Cathedral, four exes present, Carter, Clinton, George W., Obama, and, keeping his distance, avoiding eye contact, not concealing his wish to be elsewhere, anywhere, our then head of state stood and refused to say the Lord’s Prayer, didn’t sing, didn’t amen, scowling as he shook a few hands. A sovereign head of state would’ve been appropriate in the ways a real-estate mogul finds difficult.

We are Americans, we can’t help it. When one courtier lifts the silver orb from the casket and hands it carefully to another courtier, I want him to drop it and a great byoingyoingyoing fill the great chapel and let us see the Brits stifle their laughter and refuse to admit hearing any byoing. Same when the lone bagpiper fired up his drone and walked the long hallway playing a tune, I wanted to hear him squawk like a wounded ostrich, but he did not.

My mother, whose father came from Glasgow, was a great admirer of the Queen who was a few years younger, and she visited London and stood at the Buckingham gate looking in, as if she might be invited in for tea and scones. My London friends are ferocious republicans and we never mention monarchy in their presence, except if discussing butterflies, because it will lead to a length and learned lecture on the evils of aristocracy. The Queen met Mr. Trump and though his love of pageantry was clear and he lusted after a carriage and platoon of horsemen for himself, we shall never know what she thought of the fool, only that she was polite. She didn’t leave a memoir in which she revealed her inner qualms and anxieties: I doubt that she allowed herself the luxury of qualms. She accepted her role.

And then it was over. The coffin was lowered into the royal vault below St. George’s Chapel and people departed in an orderly fashion, each knowing whom they should follow and what they should do. As the Dean said, “The life of man is as dust,” but dusty as we are, we are capable of putting on a good pageant. By “we,” I mean “they.”

But after a couple hours of admiring tradition and ceremony and everyone knowing which foot to put where, it dawns on me that this elevation of bureaucracy to an art form is what America fortunately escaped and thus was better able to give the world the phenomenal techno advances of my lifetime, the laptop, cellphone, GPS, AI, drones, radical reductions in the cost of solar panels and wind energy, new vaccines. These things were not created by platoons of people marching in place but by brilliant gamblers and entrepreneurs, nerds of many stripes. (We also gave the world the blues and rock ’n’ roll, but that’s another story.)

An English major in college, I looked down on IT students because they all dressed alike and carried plastic pocket protectors for their ballpoint pens. I saw them as dullards. As it turns out they were at work on data technology that led to the internet, which changed my life and yours too. Meanwhile, the English department and other humanities march along beside the hearse and the horsemen.

I wanted to be eccentric and got my wish but the engineers in my family are more engaged with the real world. Thank God our president is committed to technological advance rather than cultural combat. He’s never spoken in defense of the 2020 election results. Either you can count or you can’t.

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October is coming, prepare to be bold

She told me out of the blue that she adores me. I was there, in a chair, listening; she was standing by the grandfather clock. She didn’t sing it but she said it clearly. This should answer any remaining questions. But Mister Malaise and Madam Miasma are ever on our trail, skulking in woodlands and meadows, waylaying the vulnerable, requiring us to drink discouragement and despair, and they got me a few days ago, two weeks after mitral valve replacement, walking tall in Transitional Care, transitioning back to normal life when I was hit (in the time it takes to tell it) by abject weakness, dizziness, nausea, and had to be locked up in hospital and tubes put in my arms for blood and antibiotics, and then released in a weakened semi-invalid state. It’s a lousy feeling. I look out at Minneapolis and imagine it’s Odessa, which it is not. I worry the Swiss banks will fail. Water mains will burst. Bacon will be banned, leaving us with vegan substitute.

The body wants to heal and it has felicitous intuitions how to go about doing it but meanwhile I ache and shuffle around like an old grampa and hike the hallways and work at maintaining a cheerful outlook (false). My wife is a worrier and when we promised to love and honor each other 27 years ago, diarrhea and vomiting weren’t mentioned in detail, so I walk carefully.

Life throws a beanball at your head and you dig in at the plate and swing at the slider. Look at Columbus, whom we honor in October, the month he landed in the New World. Some dishonor him because he came uninvited but there was plenty of uninvited migrating and mooching around in the 15th century. You took your chances. And it was a bold venture to sail out on the ocean blue with no idea of where you’re going. No wonder he was paranoid. He stood at the helm — it hurt to sit because he had horrible hemorrhoids — and guessed he was near India whereas he was closer to Indiana. Still, some of us admire his courage.

October is a month that encourages courage. The languors of summer are finally dispersed and the chill of reality in the air tells you to get to business.

No wonder Brother Martin Luther on that October day in 1517 roused himself to nail his 95 theses to the church door at Wittenberg. Pounding nails into a door of any kind goes against a good German’s nature, but he did it, announcing that salvation is a gift of God’s grace, not available for purchase, for which he was outlawed but went on to lend his name to a major bunch of Prots. Whereas Pope Leo X is known for his diet of worms.

It was in October 1781, that Washington and Lafayette whipped Cornwallis’s ass at Yorktown and brought the American Revolution to a successful end. It had gone on long enough, Washington decided. Time to dispose of the foe and get down to the real problem, which was figuring out what sort of government would take the place of the Crown. So Washington pretended to be laying siege to British-occupied New York City but in fact was rushing his troops south where he caught the redcoats by surprise and made short work of them.

And Cornwallis surrendered. He didn’t claim the battle was fraudulent and that he was the true winner, nor did he slip out of Yorktown a day early to avoid having to hand over his sword. He handed it over.

Washington did this despite his terrible dental problems. False teeth made of wood and ivory that chewed his gums as he chewed his beans and mutton. We do not know for a fact that the Father of Our Country did not assign one of his slaves to chew his food for him. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. But his bold move on Cornwallis did more to secure our independence than the Declaration of 1776 did. Anybody with a pen can declare independence; somebody has to get the job done.

And so it comes down to you and me, friend, as to what needs doing in October. Leaves must be raked, storm windows hung, and we must listen to candidates and distinguish hogwash from common sense. And I must climb up from my clobbering and be ready when the bell rings for the next round.

 

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What if it does and they do?

Sea levels are rising as the polar ice caps melt and now it’s clear why Republicans are in favor of global warming, it’s a form of gerrymandering. It destroys the Democratic coasts and drives disheartened Manhattanites westward to wander lost and confused in Ohio, their sophistication shredded, their street smarts useless. The Obamas will lose their place on Cape Cod and move to Omaha. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez will wind up in Topeka and go back to bartending. The fashion industry will move to Des Moines and polyester plaids will make a big comeback. Broadway will, of course, settle in Oklahoma –– where else?

My love and I live on the 12th floor of a building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, which won’t be so upper much longer and so we’re thinking of buying a kayak so we can still make it to Zabar’s when the streets are flooded. We’ll paddle around the little islands that used to be Central Park and the Belvedere Castle to look in the Guggenheim, which will be turned into a water slide, and when Zabar’s closes with its fabulous cheese section where a shopper gains weight simply by inhaling, then we’ll order a chopper to lift us off the roof and wave goodbye to the old life and be flown to Pittsburgh to fly back to Minnesota. One chapter ends, another begins.

As you can see (to your horror) I am rather benign about the Union of Righteous Republican States (URRS) that the rising seas will create. I face the prospect with equanimity, same as I face the prospect of a monsoon or a ban on Pearson’s Salted Nut Rolls or my laptop computer being crushed under the wheels of a truck, because I am newly out of the OR with a beautiful scar on my chest, I’m walking with a cane, and to me everything is miraculous, walking, conversation, meatloaf, oatmeal, sunshine, prune juice, my daughter’s voice on the phone, even the voice of Tri my physical therapist telling me to stand on one foot with my eyes closed for fifteen seconds. It’s all good.

It helps to be eighty, with a treasury of interesting regrets I can examine if I choose. It also helps to know that a pig saved my life, the donor of a mitral valve, mine having sprung a leak. I dreamed of her last night, singing to me from hog heaven:

I gave you a new lease on life
Gave you a brand-new start
Other people are on your mind
But I am there in your heart

I gave you a piece of my heart, baby
Enjoy the sweet sunshine
Roll in the mud, it’s there in your blood,
The part of your heart that’s mine.

This mitral valve is working very well, according to the Mayo Clinic, and when a pig part is what keeps you going, it is an everyday miracle you never forget.

It also helps to be married to my wife. I’m not a New Yorker, she is, though she was born in the same dinky hospital in Minnesota that I emerged from, but I grew up in a basement, which I took to mean abasement, and she grew up in a home with classics on the shelves and she played violin and listened to Sibelius and Brahms, all of which turned her head eastward. I only went there for the money: The New Yorker was a magazine that paid real dough. In 1974 they paid me $6,000 for a piece about the Grand Ole Opry and I took up a life of self-amusement. Meanwhile, she, a true artist, lived in poverty in tiny fifth-floor walk-ups with three roommates and two cats and heroin addicts sleeping in the entry so that she could play great music. She went for Bach, I went for the bucks. We are opposites who pair up well.

And now, thinking of the life of Elizabeth II, a life of devotion to inherited duty, we see the merits of fidelity and soldiering on. The British Commonwealth shrank severely during her long reign and she remained the same gracious lady, riding in the carriage, waving. Brits of fiercely opposing views could look on her with affection and respect.

And so if the oceans rise and mountains fall and we have mandatory prayer in schools and election of the president by state legislatures and there is a life-size portrait of Himself in every post office, I shall still pledge allegiance to the flag and to the Republicans for whom it stands.

 

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Never been such times as these before, I swear

It’s good for your breathing, the deep breaths you must draw at the systemic shamelessness of Mar-il-Legal, the casual heist of government stuff, the FBI arriving to take away the top-secret documents and all, the refusal by the Former to acknowledge error, his wholesale abuse of the FBI, and then the weaselish dictum by the Trump judge to hold the DOJ at bay, it was breathtaking, like watching a hippo climb a tree.

The sorting of material, separating articles of clothing from top-secret documents into their own piles, seems to be a problem for DJT, according to the FBI. Surely the man’s valet puts the socks in the sock drawer and not with the golf balls and cheeseburgers, but in his official dealings DJT seems prone to chaos.

Orderliness is no requirement for holding high office. There’s no reason candidates should offer their closets for inspection. I doubt that Ron DeSantis stores piles of Florida state secrets along with admiring articles and a golf cap given him by the emir of Qatar. It would be good to know, however, if he has ever been in charge of four or more children under the age of five for a three-day weekend, unassisted, I’d be impressed more than by his strutting around rewriting Florida’s school curriculum.

Do our elected leaders not realize that we can see through them? They are frosted glass. Their attempts at nobility do not impress: it’s like watching a man throw horseshoes at a pine tree. There is no ding, just a crunch.

This should be high season for political ridicule. (Where are you, Bill Maher?) John Fetterman will win Pennsylvania by his wicked mockery of the hapless Oz, who said he grew up south of Philly by which he meant New Jersey. The man is lost in the fog of his own celebrity. Tony Evers looks good in Wisconsin thanks to his use of a photo of Ron Johnson with his mouth open wide enough to swallow a softball. And Herschel Walker in the Senate? The man does not bear close inspection.

A master of insult was Winston Churchill, a struggling politician, an inspiring wartime leader, and then a magnificent author, who in his early years said of his fellow conservative: “I wish Stanley Baldwin no ill, but it would have been much better if he had never lived.” Brilliant, how the polite “no ill” perfectly sets up the throat chop.

The Former, who has been trying for years to master the Churchillian scowl, is seriously humor-impaired. There are unemployed joke writers around but he never thought to hire one. He was a name-caller on a fourth-grade level (Lyin’ Ted, Crooked Hillary) or he slapped a LOSER sticker on someone’s back and let it go at that. So much venom and no fangs to make it work for him.

The Brits do insult so much better. So we should steal from them. “A shiver looking for a spine to run up” could be applied to Mitch McConnell just as well as to Edward Heath, the original target. “A sheep in sheep’s clothing” fits any number of people. “He eats used toilet tissue in the hope that he will someday get used to the taste” fits Kevin McCarthy perfectly. And “He is the only man I know who immatures as he ages” is the Former in twelve words. It’s a poke in the snoot that disarms even as it raises a welt.

There is some precedent for insult in American politics. Lincoln and Douglas dusted each other up. In 1932 Democrats called Hoover a “timid capon” and Hoover came back and called Roosevelt “a chameleon on plaid.” The problem today is the amiable Biden. He was in the Senate too long and, coming from a safe blue state, he believed in bipartisanship. His Philly speech about MAGA was devoid of insult. Not a funny line in it.

MAGA has portrayed Joe as senile, a mumbling geriatric, and his civility only plays into their hands. The way for Joe to gain broad public respect is to say, “I wish Donald Trump no ill. It would be unfortunate were he to be hit in the head by a golf ball. But it would be a catastrophe for the country if someone gave him CPR.” No need to trot up the steps to Air Force One, you just kick the hippo where it hurts.

 

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Lying in bed, grateful for it all

A week in hospital has brought me back to an appreciation of Jell-O, scrambled eggs, mac and cheese, the banana, food that is beyond criticism. There is no such thing as a deluxe banana. The best mac and cheese you ever had was not significantly better than the worst. My beloved disagrees. She is somehow repelled by Jell-O, perhaps she thinks if you eat it you’ll wind up living in a trailer park. To me, Jell-O is what it is, Jell-O. My dad lived in a trailer park and loved it; I think it gave him a sense of imminent mobility. Hitch up the tow, let’s go to Orlando.

My beloved has some Swedish ruminants in her ancestry whereas I have coyotes in mine. The ruminants had a taste for savory weeds and the coyotes only ate weeds to get the taste of chicken feather out of their mouths. Somehow we’ve made a happy marriage out of this.

Hospital food, the cuisine of the Good Enough, takes me back to the foundation of my being: don’t complain, it could be worse. Visit Verdun, the battlefield where three-quarters of a million died in 1916 for feudal empires that were themselves dying, princes festooned with feathered helmets and unearned medals. German artillery versus French infantry, outmoded strategy versus modern technology, and it went on for three hundred days and laid the groundwork for World War II. Pure insanity, but in America men marched off to it proudly to blazing music before cheering crowds. The Civil War belonged to their grandfathers, they needed one of their own.

As I lay on the table in OR, sedation creeping up on me, I thought, “I don’t want my sudden demise to blemish the record of a great surgeon, but for me personally, this would not be the worst way to go.” I’m glad I survived, even though when I emerged, six hours later, I was 115. And now that I am working on dematuration, I believe that I will never complain about food ever again. Nor lousy poetry. Nor fatuous commentary.

I believe I’ve arrived at the age of contentment. I used to know people who aspired to change the world and who wore themselves out trying, meanwhile the world was changed by gangs of nerds who, purely for the amusement of problem-solving, invented the iPhone and Google so that a person could walk around with four tons of reference materials in a shirt pocket and easily fact-check the death toll at Verdun and not do as I did, which was to reach up on a high shelf for the Encyclopedia Britannica: S thru V, a twelve-pounder, almost dropping it on my head to become the latest casualty of the battle.

But we were talking about Jell-O, I believe. Mine was festive, in a bowl, cubes of bright basic colors. It reminded me of the colorful checked shirts of insurance salesman who wanted to look like recreation directors, not men in the mortality business. I share the feeling. I left the hospital and came to the Palisade for Old English Majors and was offered a wheelchair, which I declined and also a walker (no, thanks). “Do you know where you are?” she said. “Minnesota,” I replied, and I recited from memory the 87 counties from Aitkin to Yellow Medicine, which saved me from the Memory Unit. I did an impressive performance of walking down the hall, back straight, eyes forward, holding a black cane that had belonged to my father, John, and then my mother, Grace. They were awestruck.

It’s an elegant cane that makes me think of the corps of French and German diplomats who sat down at long tables and displayed their fine language skills and excellent manners as, not far beyond their railway coach, seventy thousand men were dying every month.

And here I sit waiting for my daughter to call so we can tell jokes. I do “What’s a good name to give a boy born without feet? Neil.” And she does “A man was put in prison for throwing an enormous boulder into a field of potatoes. Why? Because he killed tubers with one stone.”

Thanks to the cane, I can walk with grace when I go to the john. Tomorrow I walk to church and I shall thank the Lord for His part in inspiring the vast kindness I’ve been privileged to witness up close. Other disasters are on the way that may make the planet uninhabitable. Dear God, have mercy.

 

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What was done for me back in Minnesota

There is vast kindness in this world and right now I am resting in it, astonished by it, a man who in the space of 48 hours went through an ablation procedure to calm wild heart arrhythmia and then a heart valve replacement and a valve repair. I climbed aboard the gurney for the first procedure, an adult male of 80, and was borne away from the second in an infantile state, helpless, somewhat hallucinatory, a disastrous life change for a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and through it all I was aware of the young women and men in blue scrubs who were at my side, making friendly small talk while checking tubes and adjusting pillows. They asked me to squeeze their hands, wiggle my fingers, look into a bright light, push up against their hand pulling my foot down, smile, raise my eyebrows, follow their finger with my eyes, and when I did they said, “Awesome,” “Fantastic,” “Excellent.” I said, “A person doesn’t have to do much to win praise around here” and they laughed. It was the only useful thing I could do, make them laugh, so I became a lie-down comedian, interpreting literally what they said: “Oh, we are going to have a bowel movement now? Fine, you go first and I’ll watch and see how it’s done.”

I was at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, but of course it could’ve been one of dozens of hospitals. These angelic beings in blue are a widespread tribe and you may not be aware of their existence — I was not — unless you’re in extreme need. A bedridden old man in the thrall of dark visions is in deep need. “What can we do for you?” they asked; I said, “Make me a better person.”

I tried to pee into a small plastic urinal and peed inaccurately down my left leg and a woman cleaned it up. I apologized. “Happens all the time,” she said. After a series of bowel softeners I felt movement in my innards and pressed the Call button and pushed my walker toward the toilet and got tangled up in a couple IV tubes and left a path of shit across the floor and said I was sorry to the woman in blue and she laughed and said, “That’s what we’re here for.”

What astonishes me is the motivation of men. Back in my day, women went into nursing because they were good people, men wanted to be big shots and VIPs, maybe jerks. I wanted to be a bestselling author, be admired, get extravagant reviews in the Times. I’m over it now. I write because I want to tell you about these people who meant so much to me. I took a shower with the help of two women, a naked old man sitting on a bench under warm water, being scrubbed down, the tape removed from the incision, the scar gently patted down with liquid soap — there was nothing erotic about it, not a single dirty joke flashed to mind, only astonishment at these two. Nursing is the occupation that comes closest to what Jesus told His followers to do — heal the sick, whatsoever you do for the poor you do for me. Bathing the poor, feeding them, adjusting their pillows, making small talk to reassure them of their humanity.

The men and women nurses I met were so much of a type, solid, unfailingly polite, prepared to lift or scootch or straighten a tangle of wires, ready to explain medical science to me who knows nothing. You press the button, they’re there.

America is a Protestant country and we skipped the foot-washing, love-thy-neighbor aspects of the faith, preferring preaching, a performance art that lets you despise your neighbor and thereby raise yourself up. Our politics today is tortured by its Protestantism. The Sisters of St. Mary who founded this hospital may have inherited some dreadful theology but they took a better path, they lay hands on the suffering, they soothed the fevered brow, they lifted the fallen.

I preached this to a young man as he cleaned out my IV and he was amused to be considered saintly. He grew up on a farm and got a job in a nursing home. “I knew I could be good at this. I liked playing music but I wasn’t good enough. And I wanted to bring up my family in my hometown.” Still I feel there’s a new style of manhood forming, part of the vast kindness. I owe my life to these people and I am profoundly grateful. I’m jumping up and down and pissing in my pants, doing the urinal dance.

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It’s an age of innovation, praise the Lord

One of the problems of living a long life is that you lose track of who is famous now. I, for example, have no idea who Adele is. I could mention other unknown celebs but I forget their names. Most of the famous people I know are dead, such as Abraham Lincoln, Al Kaline, A.J. Liebling, and Alexander Graham Bell, just to mention a few on the A list, and Adele is a complete blank. So is the famous singer-songwriter Taylor Speed. She is huge among young people with beautiful hair and I don’t know her from a waitress at White Castle. She could walk up to me on the street and say, “Hi, Garrison, it’s me, Taylor” and I’d have to stand there and feign familiarity and sneak out my phone and snap a picture of her and use my facial recognition app to give me the name. Swift. Not Speed. Swift.

On the other hand, growing old, you’re stunned by the beautiful innovations all around us — FaceTime and Shazam and MeTube and Google, the Dairy Queen Blizzard, the Unsubscribe function on junk email, and the defibrillator embedded in my chest, upper left, that makes me imagine I have a pack of Luckies in my pocket: these more than make up for being out of the celebrity loop.

I have an AlexaPlus app on my phone that keeps track of people I know and if I’m having lunch with Marnie today, it reminds me that she has three grandkids, one of them a genius, that she’s had knee replacement surgery, is agnostic, from Des Moines, is bitter about the divorce from Jerry, and is estranged from her daughter Lona over political differences — Marnie uses the pronoun “we” and Lona refers to her as “it” — and how Alexa knows this, I don’t want to know.

When you get old, you find that you have a few friends and you know hundreds of people slightly, so it’s good to have AlexaPlus to lean on. I go for a walk using GPS and FRT and through my hearing aid Alexa says, “There’s a curb three steps ahead and in fifty feet there’s a pile of dog poop. The smiling woman approaching you is your upstairs neighbor Melissa. The man with her is not her husband. She says he’s a cousin. I have my doubts.”

This, to me, is the real beauty of the hearing aid. You can take phone calls through it, and you can use your BioBot app to identify trees and birds and breeds of dogs. I was an English major in college and lived most of my life in abject ignorance of the natural world and now, walking with my wife in the park, when she says, “Look. A sugar maple.” I click the clicker in my pocket and say, “No, it’s a black tupelo. You can tell by the red leaves and the berries. And the two birds are Blackburnian warblers, both male. Young. They migrate, navigating by starlight, and get confused by city lights and many die in collisions with windows.”

She is impressed by my tone of authority. Old men tend to dither and speak in generalities and BioBot lets me narrate with the authority of a park ranger. It feels good. Statistics show that a sense of authority increases a man’s testosterone by 38 percent and testosterone is a powerful deterrent of dementia and it can reverse hearing loss.

I don’t want to be a know-it-all so I don’t use the AmHist or TheoPhilo or PoliSci apps, but I do sometimes employ Happy App, which, tuned in to the conversation and surveilling the physical landscape, feeds me relevant jokes. The app spots a dog and it whispers, “So the dog walked into the bar and said, ‘How about a drink for a talking dog?’ and the bartender said, ‘Sure. The toilet is down the hall, first door on the left.’” Or it sees a blond and says, “There was a blond who carried a transparent lunch box so she could tell if she was going to work or coming home.”

There is also the Fact app, also known as the BS app because Boy Scouts are truthful. It makes a low hum when it detects dishonesty and as lie is piled on lie, the tone rises to a squawk and then a shriek. I don’t use the app because I find it annoying.
Any questions? Comments? Click HERE if you want me to shut up.

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