Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 35

The road to good health is a twisting path

A few days at the Mayo Clinic and I see that I must change my life. For one thing, eyedrops. I need to irrigate the eyes but in searching for eyedrops I often come across something more interesting such as an old photograph of the staff at YMCA’s Camp Warren in Eveleth, Minnesota, one including me, 19, tall and lean, third row on the left, and now I try to remember the names of the others, meanwhile my eyes dry up.

What I need is a powerful woman named Greta who will grab me every two hours and throw me down on the floor and force my eyes open and drop eyedrops in them.

I also need to get out and walk strenuously and for this I must hire a kidnapper named Junior who will bind my hands and throw me in the back of his car and drive me six miles away and leave me there with no billfold, no cash, no paper and pen with which to write a note (PLEASE GIVE ME A RIDE), and will watch from a distance to make sure I don’t stick my thumb out.

Other people have hired trainers to compel them to exercise but this doesn’t work for me. The trainer is a youngish woman named Leonie or Larisa and I invite her to look at the photo of the Camp Warren staff and I talk about these YMCA counselors and their tragic lives in crime, one a compulsive arsonist, another ran the biggest Ponzi scheme in Minnesota history and one stole catalytic converters, and soon Lynette or Lois is in tears and the hour is up and exercise is forgotten. “I need a drink,” she says, and I make her a Manhattan. I pay her for her time, and then I go back to sitting around.

I need to drink more water. Here I live in a New York apartment, the streams and lakes of the Catskills have been channeled through vast underground conduits to provide pure drinking water to twelve million people and yet I hardly ever go to the tap and run water into a glass. Dehydration makes me fatigued, and all I need to do is drink six or eight glasses of water a day, problem solved. I need to be intubated from a water pack on my back. Either that or Naomi the school nurse with a pistol, saying, “Drink or die.”

How did I get so messed up? I come from a good family. And there’s the problem. I set out to become an artist, which meant I had to disregard the rules of good health. Did James Joyce drink six glasses of water a day and do his crunches and stretches and administer his eyedrops? No, he sat in Les Deux Magots and drank absinthe and gin and wrote in a cramped hand in his notebook as his eyesight got worse and worse. So I set out on this same course, hoping to emulate him and write Ulysses and it hasn’t happened yet.

Nonetheless, I feel very fortunate. Despite my loose life, I can still stand on one foot, eyes closed, for ten seconds. And then I think of Jack Armstrong who ran the kayak program at Camp Warren and I’m grateful to be me and not him. Jack was a powerful kayaker, a model to the rest of us, who ascended rapids with ease while singing voyageur ballads and made camp using only pine boughs and dining on turtles and ferrets. He was Mr. Wilderness. He gave chapel talks on self-sufficiency. He was Thoreauvian to the core. But he drank bad water from a creek. This is the irony of living in nature — there’s bad water out there, whereas New York tap water is the best in the world.

The bad water brought on dementia and he wound up in New York. In Minnesota, his home was the wilderness but in New York he resided in abandoned rail tunnels and found food in restaurant garbage. I ran into him on Amsterdam Avenue and said, “Jack, it’s me, Keillor,” and he didn’t know me. “Camp Warren,” I said. There was no sign of recognition. He didn’t know who he was or why. Some things are worse than dehydration, such as the loss of selfhood. Praise God from Whom clean water flows; I’m feeling lucky, goodness knows.

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The old man stands on stage and tells jokes

It was a week of crazy change, a couple of big wallops, and here I am still standing, head bowed but marching forward. An ace ophthalmologist broke the news that my dimming eyesight is the result of glaucoma, which makes me grateful that I’m 80 because if I were young this would be very bad news but at my age I can see a way around it.

And on the same day, the University of Michigan found out that its prized Galileo manuscript is a fake, in which Galileo noted his observations of Jupiter, which led him to challenge 17th-century dogma that the universe revolves around Earth, which made him a heretic — it’s the work of a 20th-century forger — which means (Yes!) that the universe does revolve around Earth and that FBI agents attempting to distract the nation from the Galileo hoax planted top-secret papers at Mar-a-Lago in hopes of unseating the one truly elected (by a landslide) president, Mr. Trump, who is the center of the center of the universe.

If you step outside and look at the night sky, you see clearly that indeed we are the center. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a loser.

The glaucoma news was definitive and I was glad to have it. No need to sit in more ophthalmologists’ chairs, chin on the chinrest, looking at the doctor’s earlobe as he or she peers through the scope into my dilated eyeball — I have the answer: I am (very) slowly going blind. So look to the future and make the best of the deal.

I never was a sight-seer. I know too many amateur photographers who compulsively take pictures of dewy meadows, sunsets, sunrises, wildlife, birds, more birds, and they bring out portfolios of pictures and you’re required to glance at each one and sigh — well, they don’t pass their portfolios to a blind man. He is free of it.

My wife loves fine art. I don’t. Andy Warhol exposed the art world for the sham it am and who needs it? When I gain my blindness, I’ll accompany her to the Met and I’ll wait in the coffee shop and overhear young women discussing their relationships. Mark Rothko is an empty shell compared to women’s descriptions of their partners. They know more about humanity than Van Gogh ever guessed at.

I’ve always preferred music and conversation to the visual arts. Dance is a bore, all the extensions and twirling and dippy-hippy moves. Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake is all you need to know, and Mahler’s Fourth and the Brandenburgs and some Chopin. Listen to them in the dark and you feel the emotional force full-strength.

My new career, beginning now, is octogenarian stand-up performance and I look forward to the day — in ten years, maybe twenty — when I walk onstage wearing black glasses, carrying a cane, and feel a wave of sympathy from the crowd and I sing:

The blind man stood in the road and cried,
Crying, O Lord, show me the way to go home.

The song is so heartfelt, people get teary-eyed and no longer do they see a white man of privilege, they see a fellow sinner in trouble, and when I have them on the verge of anguish, I go into my storytelling. Homer was a blind man who gave us the Iliad and the Odyssey and in his honor, I shall proclaim:

Speak, Memory, of myself the hero,
Lost time and again, at sea, confused,
Blinded by reckless ambition, and now,
I the wanderer have, by loss of sight,
Regained my memory and found my way
Home to my wife.

It’s a great opening. I’ll tell of my own history — I’m 80, I’ve got buckets of it — and recite poems and sing and when needed go into some blind-man jokes, many of them dirty. A sighted man couldn’t tell them, he’d be lynched, strung up, only a blind man can tell them, so I will.

Blindness is an opportunity, not a problem. Other writers give readings; I don’t. I have no paper, I let memory speak and it does and I’m amazed at what it recalls. My Crandall ancestors were driven out of the colonies in 1776 by my wife’s ancestors, the Spencers and Holmans and Griswolds, and my grandpa James Crandall came to Minnesota where his descendants crossed paths with my wife’s Holmans, and ancient enmity was buried and I fell in love with the family that stole our silverware and drove us to Canada.

So when my blindness is complete, so long as the sun keeps going around the Earth, I’ll be the greatest glaucomedian of all time. You read it here first.

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Forget about songwriting. Try fiction.

The word from people who know is that Taylor Swift is working with younger edgier indy artists, trying to stay relevant, hoping to hang on in today’s rapidly shifting pop culture, trying to free herself from the bonds of the narrative lyric and pick up the style of spatter imagery. Miss Swift is 32.

So forget about songwriting. Thirty-two is much too young for irrelevance. In solid professions such as medicine, engineering, law, the humorous essay, you’re just hitting your stride at 32. Miss Swift’s problem is that she prospered for years appealing to 11-year-old girls but now much of her audience is in its early twenties and doesn’t want to be in the same demographic with 11-year-olds so she needs to change the act to drive away the children, make it edgy, frighten the parents.

I see the perils of the music biz while strolling around Central Park on a weekend and passing by kiddie birthday parties where East Side parents have gone to vast expense to celebrate their child’s second or third birthday. The parents are guilty, having hired young women to raise the kiddos, and the lavish party, with catered hot dogs and potato salad and a designer cake, flocks of balloons and streamers, perhaps a mime artist and a monkey, a craft table, a photographer, and a singer, is meant to show the depth of their love. A dozen toddlers sit on the grass, the birthday girl or boy wearing a gold crown, and the singer entertains, and it’s all too obvious: she is talented, beautiful, has a degree in theater, had Broadway ambitions, and now she is performing for two-year-olds, which is like singing to a herd of house cats. She sings her heart out, big projection, great articulation, hoping to impress the mothers standing in back who may hire her for their kids’ birthdays, and she cries, “Let’s all clap our hands!” to kids who don’t know their hands from their feet, and it breaks my heart. Miss Show Biz was a star back in Iola, Kansas, and now she’s a joke: what’s next for her? Singing at birthday parties for dogs?

I intended to move to New York when I was 24 and become a writer and I got myself a room in a rooming house on West 19th and met a serious photographer who drove cab at night to support his wife and two infant daughters living in a squalid tenement on the Lower East Side and taking photographs in the afternoon, black-and-white pictures of street people, most of them as depressed as he. I followed him around for a few days, thinking I’d write about him, but seeing his life up close decided me on going back to Minnesota. A young artist needs friends, supporters, aunts, perhaps a welcoming basement for a while.

Being young and broke in a strange big city with nothing but a distant dream in your pocket is a form of imprisonment and not a course to be taken lightly unless you have a nice trust fund to fall back on. A friend of mine is a successful photographer, also b&w like the cabdriver, but he stayed close to home and married a woman with a good job and they practiced birth control. Twenty years later, the art world started smiling on him.

As for me, I am an heir to the Keiller orange marmalade fortune. The Keillers in Scotland died off and we American Keillors, who were illiterate farmers and misspelled our own name, found a trunk full of stock certificates in a barn in Barnstable belonging to Thomas Keillor in 1774, but Thomas was a Loyalist, opposed to the Revolution, and the shame of this caused many Keillors to change their names. Ralph Waldo Keillor did and Henry Wadsworth Keillor and also George and Martha Keillor. Meanwhile, Thomas fled to Canada with the marmalade stocks, which fell to my grandpa James and then my father John, so my siblings and I are loaded. It’s a long story. And that’s how I financed my career in fiction. My ambition had been to write limericks, but thank goodness I gave that up. There’s no money in it, just misery.

Young men who take up light verse:
It’s not a career, it’s a curse.
Clean rooms or wash dishes,
Rhyme is pernicious,
It’s a huge waste of time, perhaps worse,
A tragic decision
Leading to supervision
In a mental ward by a trained nurse.

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Enjoying my irrelevance, thank goodness

“You are the only person I know who gets dressed up to go to the doctor’s,” my wife told me the other day, and I pointed out to her that I was not wearing a tie, only a gray pinstripe suit and white shirt, top button open, and dark cloth shoes, not wingtips. Still she was impressed.

This is a feature of marriage to a much younger woman: her frequent wonderment. I remember Harry Truman, she grew up with LBJ. She’s a late boomer, my generation doesn’t have a name because we predate narcissism, the country was too busy fighting fascism and saving the world, they didn’t bother to hand out generational identities. My wife is astonished that when I visited my grandma on the farm and I had to get up in the night, I went to the foot of the bed and used a chamber pot. To her, this places me back in the 19th century and I don’t mind. Great things happened back then, indoor plumbing being one of them. So I wear a suit to the doctor’s to show him that he’s dealing with a historic personage, a man who carries a piece of our nation’s noble heritage, not some yo-yo or schlump.

I led a free and independent boy’s life, growing up, back before parents read books about parenting, and after my morning chores, I got on a bike and joined other boys and we played cowboys and Indians or we played Civil War, and I usually was an Indian or fought for the Confederacy, so I grew up feeling romantic about Lost Causes. As a white male novelist, I am very comfortable today; my books sell in the low four figures and this gives me the same sense of validation I got when I was nine and fought for Stonewall Jackson.

My wife grew up in a feminist household and so she is the fixer and planner, she walks into a hardware store with complete confidence, she issues crisp orders to plumbers and painters. They glance at me, sitting in a dim corner with a pad and pencil, chuckling to myself, and ask, “Do you need to run this by him?” and she says, “No, he’s an essayist.”

She runs our life while I fight for lost causes, my current one being the plague of impactfulness, the use of “impact” as a verb, mostly by millennials writing mission statements, trying to put some muscle into paragraphs of limp macaroni.

Impactfulness is the result of the flood of Canadians coming over our undefended northern border, tens of thousands of hockey players seeking warmth and music and sophistication, but bringing their Canadian censoriousness with them. Northerners have always claimed moral authority over others, the inevitable result of wall maps and their impactful verticality. I’m from Minnesota, I know about supposed moral superiority, and I know that my crusade will have the impact of wet Kleenex trying to stop a speeding locomotive, that a younger generation is impacting like a steam hammer, or imagines it is, and “impactful” is gaining popularity and my opposition is totally irrelevant.

Well, I enjoy my irrelevance.

I got a letter from a candidate pleading for $25, accusing his opponent of getting millions from wealthy celebs such as Ryan Seacrest and Kendall Jenner and I was pleased that I have no idea who those two are. I am not a TV watcher, I don’t tune in talk shows, I don’t walk around with earbuds. I watched the Jan. 6 hearings, which were riveting television, and I watch baseball, which Abner Doubleday designed for TV. In fact, it’s better on TV because you can turn off the announcers, silence the crowd, walk away during an endless inning and make yourself popcorn with real butter on it and a glass of ice water, chat with your dear wife who is reading through a plumbing supply catalog, step outside and look at the Milky Way, and return to the TV for the 10th inning, the team at bat awarded a baserunner on 2nd, a new rule that makes great sense. (And how many new rules can you say that about?)

It’s a good life, the Seacrestless and Jenner-free life, the woman in charge of practical matters as God intended her to be, the old man penning an essay as the batter lofts a fly to right and the baserunner tags and takes third. Our shortstop comes to bat, swings at the second pitch and makes impact and the runner scores and I’m happy. There’s injustice in the world and plastic particles poisoning the dolphins but I’m okay for now. We’ll get to the rest tomorrow.

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Drama is life trying to get our attention

When an old man prepares for open-heart surgery, he maintains a confident demeanor and so does his good wife. He has an excellent surgeon and the procedure has been around since he was a teenager, pioneered by Dr. Walt Lillehei of Minneapolis. All is well. Stay calm and pull your socks up.

The old man is me and Dr. Lillehei attended the University of Minnesota, as I did, but he did not major in English as I did nor did he write surreal poetry and doomsday fiction that took a stab at cynicism. I come from fundamentalist Scots who would’ve looked on heart surgery as a waste of money. The heart is sinful and heart disease is caused by rich living and can be remedied by physical labor, thinner dinners, and prayer. Dr. Lillehei came from progressive Norwegians and he had more curiosity.

I’ve been down this road before, July 2001, under Dr. Orszulak at Mayo, and I rolled into the OR feeling quite chipper, prepared to joke around, and then the anesthesiologist did something and I disappeared. I awoke with an angelic being in blue scrubs whispering to me. I went home for a pleasant couple of weeks lounging in the backyard and resumed life.

Of course I am twenty years older now and things could be different. So the patient tries to gain a clear look at his own life.

It was wildly lucky. I switched from surreal and cynical to light comedy as easily as you’d junk a rusty VW and accept the gift of a Jaguar. I found comedy quite amiable. I worked hard because it offered an escape from a hopeless marriage. I survived some rocky times to earn a pile of money, which I flung in many directions. I bought a mansion that looked like a train station and felt like one too. There was a high wall around the backyard that gave it a penal quality. I bought 80 acres in Wisconsin and put a log cabin on it and discovered that peace and quiet make me uneasy. I took expensive vacations I didn’t enjoy.

What I enjoyed was work. Then I met and married Jenny, who has a forgiving soul and is very funny on top of it. I tell her how much I adore her and she makes a sound like “Hnnh” that always cracks me up. She is a violinist, well-traveled, a New Yorker at heart though she grew up in my hometown so she knows what she’s dealing with. She is a keeper. I feel well-kept.

I am not a forgiving person. I have not yet forgiven two former employees who got me in a shakedown scheme and I made the mistake of settling with them before I had cleared my name. I know I should forgive them before I go under the knife but I don’t know how. The man who cooked up the scheme I sincerely wish would rot in hell but I need to cleanse my heart and have only a short time in which to accomplish this.

Carrying anger in your heart is misery in a bottle and my rector Kate suggested I read Fred Luskin, a psychologist who leads a forgiveness training program at Stanford, if you can imagine such a thing. He put out a book giving nine steps toward forgiveness and No. 3 says that forgiveness does not necessarily mean reconciliation, which is an enormous relief. I envisioned having to put my arms around the traitor and feeling his white beard against my cheek and whispering words of endearment. This would not be within my powers. Mr. Luskin says that forgiveness is for one’s own sake, to restore peace in one’s heart, and is not play-acting. He says, “Forgiveness is for you.” He says, “Make a commitment to yourself to feel better.” I like that. And he is a psychologist so I believe him.

I make myself feel better by thinking about the times I’ve stood in front of a paying audience and hummed a note and sang, “My country, ’tis” and they all joined in and it was so beautiful, people got teary-eyed. It was intermission but instead of heading for the lobby they stood and sang. And maybe Dinah in the kitchen and “She was just seventeen if you know what I mean” and “O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder” and it was awesome. It wasn’t what they paid to see, they gave it to themselves. We all sang and found forgiveness in it. When I think of those times, it is well with my soul.

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I’m very old, as God knows, and he’s watching

I turn 80 in a few days, as I’ve been saying for about six months now and it’s a good age. I don’t think about my health, I am living proof that bad habits don’t matter so long as you give them up soon enough. I am quite happy, a BuddhEpiscopalian who doesn’t care about material things though I do fart a lot. I don’t sit around dreaming of what I might do someday. Someday is now, and what I shall do is enjoy it fully. Nobody expects more of me; if I walk into a room and don’t trip on the doorsill, I’m admired for it. My wife starts talking about air conditioning and then she sees me and says, “But why am I talking to you about it?” I’m from the time when we cooled off by driving around with the windows open.

It was a good time, my time. Back in the country I grew up in, namely this one, men didn’t go into schools and shoot little kids, we never imagined such a thing, and what’s the reason? Fewer psychiatric medications? Fewer therapists? No. If drugstores sold licorice-flavored cyanide in drinking glasses, we’d see more of that. I plan to expire before the Supremes decide the Second Amendment guarantees the right to carry knapsacks of dynamite aboard airliners. Why should we give up our rights on the Jetway?

On the other hand, I do admit there have been improvements: I was in the Detroit airport, Concourse A, the other day and a man sat at a real piano on a low platform and played music, a very graceful jazzer, nothing about man’s downfall, very danceable, and I put a ten in his jar. It was worth it. It made me feel all cheery in the midst of a merch carnival to hear genuine individual talent. It reminded me of that country I grew up in, when more musicians worked the streets.

I wish hitchhiking would make a comeback. In my youth, I was picked up by various men, some of them drunk, and in return for the ride, I listened to whatever they wanted to tell me, which sometimes was a lot. A fair trade. It was an exercise in mutual trust. Then the Seventies came along when young men affected the derelict look and when you look like an outlaw there are no free rides to be had, even if you’re very nice down deep.

With age comes a degree of wisdom. You learn to choose your battles carefully and not expend anger on hopeless causes such as fairness and equality and getting your home nice and neat. My battle is against the words “monetize” and “monetization.” What tiresome phony weirdo words they are. Just say “sell” or “cash in” or “earn a truckload of bucks from”! Even “exploit” is better. “Monetize” is an attempt to dignify with pseudo-techno-lingo the common ordinary money grubbing that we all do. Stick “monetize” up your Levis. I am going to the mat on this. I refuse to be friends with or share a cab with or sit on a plane next to a monetizer. “Flight Attendant, take me back to Tourist, a middle seat next to weeping children would be preferable to listening to this idiot vocalize.”

And now that I have demonetized you, dear hearts, let me move on to the next battle, which is to establish kindness and amiability among friends and strangers alike. I admit I’m still happy about that cashier at Trader Joe’s who said, “How are you today, my dear?” It reminded me of a bygone time. She was, I believe, a woman and I am, to my way of thinking at least, a man though of course there is fluidity involved, and as we all know, the rules of social exchange between W and M have tightened, so I didn’t ogle, I looked at my shoes and said simply, “Never better.” Which is inoffensive, though untrue.

I wanted to hug her and did not. My people weren’t huggers. We were Bible-believing Christians who avoided physical contact lest we contract the religious doubts of the embracee and who knows but what it could be true? My brother was a Bible believer who married a girl who then catholicized him. I could say more but I don’t want to cause trouble. I’m a harmless old man, nattering in the corner. I’ll stop now.

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A big event and then a major announcement

I maintain there is always hope if you look around for it. I read the first few paragraphs of a story in the Times about fungi and how they absorb carbon that might otherwise be airborne and aggravate global warming and they enable plants to survive drought and serve as fertilizers. The headline was Unearthing the Secret Superpowers of Fungus and right there was my source of happiness for the day and I read no farther lest I come across the inevitable Buts and Howevers. My podiatrist says I have fungus under my toenails. This tells me that I shall be able to dance again and maybe run the low hurdles.

It’s good of the Times to offer hope. Usually it’s a downer. You read it and learn that the seas are full of plastic, a carbon cloud is making the glaciers melt, whole species are dying out, and half of our Republican friends believe that Joe and Jill are occupying the White House illegally, so we’re not the United States, we’re the banana republic of Ameragua and bands of revolutionaries will come down from the Sierras to overthrow the tyrants. I’d rather believe in the power of fungus.

I must say I feel terrific and here I am, turning 80, waking up cheerful in the morning. When I was 17, I had uncles who sincerely believed I’d wind up friendless and threadbare, living in a shack with raccoons, feeding on boiled acorns, but it didn’t happen, and thanks to a love of moldy old jokes and my mother’s cream of mushroom soup, I am in pretty good shape. In a couple weeks, a professional anesthesiologist will suppress my faculties and a gentleman with a scalpel will open my chest, exposing my heart, and will excise the leaky mitral valve and replace it with one from an American hog.

I feel I should go to Iowa this week and meet the donor and express my gratitude. Surely this was not the fate the creature had in mind for himself. I’d like to pat his belly and scratch the top of his head and show him some love.

But why do I assume the valve comes from a male pig? I have no objection to receiving a female mitral and if this requires some transitioning on my part and identifying as a more sensitive and caring person and learning to wear pearls, then so be it. Male or female, boar or sow, pigs are known to burrow for provisions and eat a good deal of fungi that you and I pass up, so I am getting a new valve imbued with superpowers. This is my hope, as encouraged by the Times. Not some small-town Times but the New Flashing Lights York Times and my hopes are pinned on the prospect of pig power. I am going to emerge from that procedure more coherent, more considerate, more connected than ever before.

I’m thinking I may announce my candidacy for the presidency before November.

Joe’s problem isn’t his age, it’s his experience. He spent his adult life in the U.S. Senate, which is less educational than working in a restaurant or teaching third grade. It’s like being a professional Shriner or Odd Fellow. You spend hours being amiable with people you feel superior to and then you stand up and give a speech written by someone else to a chamber that’s empty except for some clerks and a bunch of grade school kids up in the balcony. This is a poor excuse of a career, compared to serving on a town zoning commission where real passions are aroused whereas in the Senate you’re simply showing off for people who agree with you. After all those years, it’s a wonder Joe speaks as well as he does.

My background, on the other hand, is fiction. I invented a town and populated it and told stories about the people in it and this, I maintain, is excellent preparation for the White House. Fiction is only persuasive if it’s based on truth. Politicians obscure, storytellers clarify. If elected, I am going to cut way back on fossil fuel and invest in fungi and hit the tycoons hard who are sponging off the rest of us. The nation cries out for a man with a piece of a beast in his heart and that man is me. I will not bore, I will sow harmony, I will be ferocious.

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Let’s talk about gender, but only for a moment

On summer vacation, I get my news from my wife, which is a great convenience and helps brighten the mood and she’s just read me the story about sharks sighted off the coast and beaches on Cape Cod and Long Island posting warnings to swimmers, which only reaffirms my lifelong aversion to beaches. Lying sunburnt on the sand, looking out at ocean vastness in the company of people who have no business wearing loincloths in public never appealed to me, especially not the vastness part. I am a domestic creature, I love enclosed spaces. I went to Alaska once, checked into a hotel in Homer, ordered room service, sat in my room with the shades drawn, and was quite content.

Now that I know about shark-infested beaches, I have one more reason to stay inland. I don’t want some poor reporter to have to write the second paragraph of my obituary, “Mr. Keillor was eaten by a shark off Jones Beach on Tuesday while wading in a raspberry-colored swimsuit and wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat fringed with straw fronds. A memorial service will be held at a time to be announced later.”

“Memorial service” suggests that there was not enough of me left to put into a burial plot. The shark took the meaty parts and other sharks got some and turtles finished the job. What was left could be put in a tunafish can. I was a productive author for fifty years but in the future, if my name comes up in conversation, someone will say, “Wasn’t he the guy who was eaten by sharks?” So I renew my vow to avoid beaches.

Thus journalism performs the useful function of confirming us in our prejudices. I read stories about Texas to confirm my decision to never set foot in the state. I read about celebrities to confirm my feeling that there are no really huge ones out there, nobody on the level of Cary Grant or Marilyn Monroe or Groucho Marx, just a hundred dozen minor ones who get into little snits about the media invading their privacy.

WELL, EXCUSE ME ALL TO PIECES — but that’s the role of the press, to peer in the window and see Mister Big Pants caught naked. Imagine seeing a secret video of Orange Man taking a mindfulness class at Mar-a-Lago, listening to sitar music while sitting in the lotus position, with lotuses around his neck.

People go to beaches to look at vastness and to temporarily forget their humdrum inland lives in enclosed quarters in the urban grid, going to an office and staring at a square screen. The occupations have nifty titles like Integral Technology or Investment Encompassment, but basically they’re all farmers, cultivating the cornfield, harvesting the eggs, butchering the pig.

After ten years or so, about the time they get the hang of the job and are truly productive, they start to feel trapped, and this is when men are tempted to purchase a boat. They want to smell the salt air and head into the waves and learn to tie interesting knots. Women scorn this. So the urge to buy a boat and go to sea is a manly urge to escape from women. This is a dangerous course for a man to take: women are the ones who can say, “What in God’s name are you doing?” and save a man from climbing a ladder to get up on a limb and take a chainsaw to cut the limb off while standing on it. Women won’t tolerate this sort of thing.

But a man on a boat is free to head out into deep waters aboard Pequod II with a bottle of brandy and a pair of binoculars and he enjoys the pitch and roll of the ship and decides to tie a half hitch in the rope on deck to secure it and accidentally gets it wound around his ankle and it’s the rope attached to the anchor and the roll of the boat loosens the anchor and it falls in the water and the man is yanked overboard and eaten by sharks. His life preserver is no protection against sharks, they chew right through it.

I promised my wife that I won’t be eaten by sharks. I’m planning to go quietly, at home, while cheering up the mourners, but I am only 80 so there’s no rush.

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Listening to that lonesome whistle blow, etc.

I am in the process of packing up and leaving Minnesota where I’ve lived for most of eighty years, which seems dramatic but isn’t since most of my classmates left long ago and Bob Dylan, who overlapped with me at the University of Minnesota, heard the lonesome whistle blow and matriculated his way to New York and if Bob ever wrote a song about hating to leave home, I’m not aware of it. The itinerant life was what he was all about.

I am fond of Minnesota, the home of Hazelden and the recovery industry and America’s front line of defense against the flood of illegals from Canada, which has led to the boom in hockey, the season now extending into summer. It’s the home of Robert Bly, author of Iron John, which was big back when there was a men’s movement but it disappeared due to gender fluidity when masculinity liquified and men were no longer required to be solid granite. I tried to be Agnes for a while but it was too late, I was in my late sixties, stoicism was baked into me, voice-raising drugs had no effect, my eyebrows are bushy, and I hate hockey, which real Minnesota women are very good at.

All of my women friends play hockey from October to June and — I don’t say this critically, believe me — they are very pushy for those eight months, and by “pushy” I don’t mean bossy, I mean they pass you on the street and give you the hip and send you careening into a parking meter. I do not get into an elevator with women; it makes me perspire just thinking about it.

I’m leaving Minnesota because there are recovery groups for everything under the sun — grief at pet loss, height inadequacy, Scandophrenia, vegephobia, compulsive colorlessness, northpolar disorder, nomenclature amnesia, traumatic taciturnity, hypercalmness, disagreement anxiety, disaster anticipation, suppression, and so forth — you name it and there’s a program for you where you will hear a talk and then break up into discussion groups, but there is no group for people in my category, old men at the high end of the contentment spectrum.

I’ve met men like me in Minnesota, and we eyeball each other and one of us says, “So how’s it going then?” We add the “then” so the other guy knows we’re from here. If I said, “So how’s it going then?” to a New Yorker, he’d say, “You mean how was it going? And what period of time are you referring to?” But a Minnesotan says, “Not so bad then.” He says it looking around to make sure no millennial hears who might grab him by the lapels and say, “Easy for you to say, having stolen land from the Lakota people and now living high off the hog thanks to the exploitation of woman and minorities.”

It’s true, of course. They’re right to be righteous. Life is unfair. I had the advantage of having seventeen aunts who all loved me and encouraged me and believed I was gifted and praised my childish scribbling and my crazed literary ambitions and predicted I’d become somebody and so I did, I became me, and I got into show business though I have the personality of a village assessor but I learned to be affable and I found eyedrops that make my eyes sparkle, but I recognize that not everyone had that advantage of admiring aunts.

Thanks to cowardice, I avoided contact sports and never was concussed, which made it possible for me to memorize the eighty-seven counties of Minnesota in alphabetic order and recite them at high speed. I was the only person in Minnesota who could do this and I did it dozens of times, once at the State Fair grandstand in front of thousands — Aitkin, Anoka, Becker, Beltrami, Benton, Big Stone, Blue Earth, Brown, and so forth — but once people have heard you do it, they’re not eager to hear it again so it’s time for me to go out in the world and make my way among strangers. I’m going to New York because I’m a fan of underground public rail transportation, and also because my wife loves New York and I love her. There’s no better reason. If you’ve gone down the wrong romantic roads often enough and then find the right one, you will follow the woman where she leads. It’s as simple as that.

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Some days are perfect: why not say so?

A summer evening on the porch overlooking the Connecticut River and Her Healthness has relaxed the rules and we’re having beef hamburgers off the grill and corn on the cob slathered in actual butter, not a vegan imitation, and the Parisian niece has baked custard tarts so delicious I decline a second knowing it would push me over the edge into decadence, a gent in capri pants and caftan, smoking a Gauloises in a cigarette holder, listening to the Gypsy Kings on my earbuds, aloof to those around me.

I’ve avoided decadence so far except for a mild addiction to Dairy Queen Blizzards, which so far is under control. I’ve avoided COVID and knee replacement and wood ticks that carry a virus that makes you talk endlessly in run-on sentences about a former president, and so it’s a pleasant evening, and we hear the happy cries of children at an old children’s camp nearby that teaches traditional values of friendship, sharing, good manners, daily chores, curiosity, and creativity. Children are not allowed electronic devices and “social justice” and “healing” are not in the mission statement, presumably “friendship” and “sharing” cover that. The boys and girls wash their faces in the morning in cold water at an outdoor trough. It’s not a church camp so they miss out on Ecclesiastes, but there is an evening campfire and I’m sure I’ve heard “Kumbaya.”

The niece and her husband are exhausted from a long day of home improvement, something else I’ve avoided. And I have escaped from youthful ambition as well to become a beloved uncle, listening to the patter of conversation and tossing in punchlines. The niece knows about tastefulness, the nephew is in finance, Her Healthness knows salads and music and art, and I am required only to be amiable.

In England, the temps got up past 100 Fahrenheit, but it’s not my problem. H.H. is an insomniac and listens to the BBC in the wee hours to induce sleep and so she is up on things British. Not me. My people left there during the reign of George III, put monarchy and Oxford accents and warm beer and baked sheep’s kidneys behind them and learned which side their corn cob is buttered on. There are no Dairy Queens in Dorset, Durham, or Cornwall, only Her Majesty and her corgis, and that’s the end of that, so far as I’m concerned. I could not be seduced by some Thames temptress the way poor Harry was stolen away by Meghan. I am content with my American woman.

This is her old family summer cottage and she is busy freshening the place up and disposing of hereditary trash, while I watch her do it. Today I held a screen in a door while she tightened the screws. That was my one assignment of the day, that and toweling off her back after her shower. “Scratch my back,” she says sometimes, and I do and I am good at it. So apparently she intends to keep me, which is good to know.

My classmates are fading away. I think back to the guy who had a heart attack at our 50th class reunion while I was giving a speech, paying tribute to old teachers — meanwhile, Rex was slumped over his mac and cheese, his neighbors asking, “Are you all right?” and he was not. My speech was the last words he heard in this world. I wish I had told a joke instead so that he had gone out laughing. Maybe the joke about the man who walks into the house with his hands full of dog turds and tells his wife, “Look what I almost stepped in,” which sums up much of life in one sentence.

We washed the dishes — H.H. believes that a dish towel only spreads germs so the dishes were racked up and left to dry overnight — and I put my hand on the niece’s shoulders and told the two of them to go home, which they wanted to do but didn’t know how to express it, and I sat on the porch with the lady and scratched her back, up high, between the shoulder blades. “Higher,” she says and I massage her elegant shoulders. This is not a chore, there’s not much creativity involved, it comes under friendship and sharing. Justice is a fine idea but I’m going for wild good fortune and now I have it in my hands.

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