Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 36

The author disembarks almost

A beautiful summer day, sitting on a porch in Connecticut, looking at boats anchored in the cove, grateful that I don’t own one. It’s one foolishness I’ve avoided in my life: most of the other numbskull boxes I have checked and as I sit here enjoying the breeze off the water, I torture myself with memories of dumbness, mistaken romances, real estate stupidity, as vivid as the incident on Wednesday when, stepping out of a New York subway car, I paused to make sure it was 42nd, and the subway doors closed on my neck.

Yes, you read that right. I had bags in my hands, and I dropped them to try to pry the doors open, my head poking out, and couldn’t, and then a man pulled them open and I got out, turned and said thank you. He was a construction guy in an orange vest. He looked concerned. Then I remembered that Penn Station is at 34th so I had to catch the next train for one stop. I got on that train and got off without incident. So I’m a man whose head is caught in the doors while getting off at the wrong stop. There are worse things. The guillotine, for one.

I beat myself up because I’m an old fundamentalist and self-mortification is our specialty. And I’ve been having too much fun lately, which confuses me, doing shows in red states to crowds that include a good many Republicans who voted for the landslide winner in 2020 but nonetheless were warm and receptive to me who voted for the thief. In blue states, audiences are listening to make sure you check the boxes of Inclusivity, Diversity, Equity, and Antiracism. These are people who don’t mind that many theaters refuse to do “Our Town” because the “Our” does not acknowledge that Grover’s Corners was stolen from indigenous people. I use the possessive pronoun in singing “My country, ’tis of thee,” which audiences in red states enjoy singing with me, and also our national anthem, ignoring the fact that Francis Scott Key did own slaves.

Back in the Sixties, when I was in my twenties, we sang “We Shall Overcome” and clearly we did not overcome, we only created new hairstyles. So we pass the torch to the young, some of whom feel the word “person” shows gender bias and want to change it to perself. To which I say, “Good luck with dat.”

Meanwhile, I study the pictures from the NASA telescope a million miles out in space, pictures of light emanating from suns billions of light years away, and I am made freshly aware of our insignificance on this tiny fragile planet circling our sun. There may be planets out there who are studying us and observing our decline and inevitable self-destruction, much as we observe a lightning bug flash and expire on a summer evening.

I am not disheartened by insignificance. I am content to be a bug. Insectitude is no problem at all. I grew up with stories in which God is seen as a person, or three persons, and He speaks to His people directly, but when I look at light that is billions of years old coming from an infinite number of galaxies, it shocks the imagination into gratitude for existence itself, nothing more, nothing less. It also makes my political registration less than interesting.

I feel this in church on Sunday morning. Feel myself disappear, my opinions, likes, dislikes, and believe myself loved by the Creator, and in that moment I am joined to others surrounding me, which was the feeling down South recently when we sang, “O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder consider all the worlds Thy hands have made,” and we were briefly united, all of us equally. I was onstage but still a firefly, singing bass.

I became an author because books appeared sort of permanent to me, and now I see it’s not true, but the recognition of brevity makes one grateful for this day, not assuming there will be another. I felt this when the subway doors bit me and I imagined the headline Author Decapitated On C Train but it didn’t happen.

Being bitten by doors is a chastening experience but it’s also a privilege to discover the kindness of strangers, a discovery worth the price. We are surrounded by goodness. The man in the orange vest was brought up to rescue the perishing. The country is full of those people. You and I are counting on that every day of our lives.

 

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Good manners are a sign of trust, no?

I was in Nashville last weekend and saw an old man wearing a shirt with eagles and red and blue stripes on it and also the preamble of the U.S. Constitution. I did a show there in front of an audience wearing more brightly colored clothes than you’d find up north, including pastels I thought had been outlawed long ago. During the show the audience (at my invitation) sang “How Great Thou Art” and other hymns with such evangelical power I was tempted to come to the Lord then and there except I’d done that already years before. And after the show I drove past two blocks of bars with garish neon signs where everyone in sight was very young and very drunk. So the South is still the South. In New York, the audience would’ve worn a lot of black or tan, the hymn would’ve been sung reluctantly but tolerantly, and you’d have to look far and wide to find universal intoxication. And in all Manhattan you wouldn’t find a shirt like that. Only on Staten Island.

I enjoy living in this country with the rest of you who are not much like me, I truly do, but I do have my limits. I come across nice young women whose arms are covered with tattoos like a child’s doodling and big dark serious ones on their legs, and I wonder why a perfectly nice woman is trying to look like a convicted felon.

So I’m narrow-minded. I’m also wary of men who collect firearms and drunks and conspiracy theorists and people who display obscene flags or bumper stickers. Have they no friends who can say, “Why are you doing this?” And I’m alarmed by people who’re rude to waiters, cleaners, cashiers, service people — I’ve been with friends who treated wait staff with cool contempt and it’s an indelible black mark by their name.

One day I was passed by a man in a supercharged car with a booming muffler who sat at the red light revving the engine so the pavement vibrated and he was a fiftyish dude with a thinning gray ponytail. And I wanted to rap on his window and ask, “How do you wish to be remembered after you’ve left this world? As a man with a loud car?”

“To each his own,” we say. “There’s no accounting for taste.” But so much of life is based on simple trust and when I see the tattoos or hear the loud muffler, I don’t want to have anything to do with those people.

I live in a New York building with doormen, which is not a job you find in the want ads. You have to know somebody, probably another doorman. Somebody retires, and Luis recommends Carlos and he’s hired and so Carlos comes as part of a compact, which is crucial for us because we trust our doormen absolutely. The keys to our apartment are at the front desk. We can’t live here without trust.

I trust my fellow New Yorkers. Now and then I’ve stumbled on a curb or a crack and staggered and right away someone or two someones are there to say, “Are you all right?” When people look out for little things, you trust they’ll look out for big things too.

I once signed online a four-page real-estate contract without reading a word of it because I knew the agents Ralph and Joyce and on that basis I casually sign an agreement involving a rather large amount of money, but if Ralph had tattoos all over his arms, I would’ve thought twice, but being a real estate man, he wears a suit and I don’t ask him to roll up his sleeves.

Go write what you want on your arms, rev your engine, drink yourself to a stupor, but I favor normality, maturity, and competence. We’ve had one 15-year-old president and now as we get a new look inside his world, there’s no need to repeat the experiment. When I go into the OR next month and meet the surgeon who’s about to replace the mitral valve, if I see a MAGA hat on his head and eagles and flags on his white scrubs, I will climb off the gurney and ask for a substitute. I prefer people who’ve skipped lightly over adolescence and become seriously fascinated by their calling in life and not be so interested in making a big noise and defying convention. The Constitution grants the right to free speech, which probably includes the right to be obnoxious and ridiculous but there is a price to be paid. You may fall and people will pretend not to notice.

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She and I and you and us, all watching TV

I have it on good authority that we now have 26 sets of personal pronouns available in English, including the gender-neutral zie, zim, zer, zis, zieself, and I expect there will be more to come since the spectrum of personal differences is endless. My wife, for example, who is adored by me, I can no longer think of as she or her, lumped in with other women including harridans, hags, harpies and shrews, and so my wife is jen and jer and jenself and several individuals whom I despise are scheiss and scheissen and scheissenself. My fellow tall persons have the pronouns hi and hiya. Height is every bit as crucial an identifier as gender and so is intelligence. I don’t know any people I’d refer to as dem or dose but surely dey’re out there somewhere.

Personal identity is a complex matter and if a pronoun is all you need to validate you, fine. It’d help if you pasted your pronoun on your forehead, but if you feel that would marginalize you or stereotype you, I understand. And now that the Supremes have made it a basic constitutional right to carry a concealed loaded weapon, I predict that we’re going to respect gender identity more than ever. A guy with a .45 under the jacket thereby becomes plural and they is going to be more numerous and you might want to become plural too.

I am thinking of becoming unique myself, and using geek and gink and gawk, but I don’t expect the plumber Mitch to respect this or my barber Tommy or Lindsay my dermatologist. Mainly it’s for my own benefit. When I was a kid, I avoided playing football and instead I wrote poetry, which was considered weird in Anoka, Minnesota, but there were other weird boys to hang out with and so we didn’t need a separate pronoun.

And now, with the Thompson-Cheney hearings, we are hearing about a president who considered Himself presidential even though the vote count showed otherwise, and He called up the fellow in Georgia who counted the votes and told him to find 11,000 more. “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” He said. He ordered that voting machines be seized. He self-identified as a capitalized pronoun and was justifiably agitated when others, including men He had appointed, told Him otherwise.

Mr. President did not wish to lose. Joe was a radical left-wing desperado who was missing some marbles, but more important, Mr. President’s father, Fred, had instilled in his boy a powerful aversion to defeat, and why should He take it lying down. And so you had that extraordinary meeting in the Oval Office in which Jeffrey Clark, an environmental lawyer in the Justice Department, offered to declare the election fraudulent if he were appointed Attorney General. And Mr. Rosen the Acting AG and Mr. Engel and Mr. Donoghue sat across the Executive Desk from Himself and told Him that all the top people at DOJ would resign en masse if Mr. Clark were made AG. And so the president backed down slightly, thus preserving the remaining integrity of the DOJ.

Mr. Clark, who pursued this ploy and lost, was a Harvard grad who got his law degree at Georgetown and you wonder what the heads of dose institutions feel like. Probably like scheissenselves. They wish Mr. Clark would take a long sabbatical in Samarkand and change his name to Janice and grow long hair and tie it up in a bun. Meanwhile, they are thinking about making Ethics a required course.

Congressman McCarthy, who will likely become Speaker of the House in January, has urged his fellow Republicans to ignore the hearings and that is excellent advice. What you don’t know can’t hurt you. The phone calls from the White House to change the vote in various states, the rampage of Rudy, the 250 million raised by Him to fight a legal battle that was already over, the mob that busted into the Capitol while He watched on TV, Mr. Clark’s tongue shining the president’s shoes — I admire people who can ignore this. It shows real willpower. I’m thinking of identifying as a Republican and using the pronouns We and Us. Democrats are a flock of flibbertigibbets and the Republican base is made of granite. Nothing can shake us. Nothing. Dynamite wouldn’t make a dent.

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Thanks in advance for reading this letter

It’s the age of gratitude, the decade I’m in. Gratitude for bromides: you wake up to find that your excellent hamburger of the evening before has made you gassy and you fizz two tablets in a glass of water and feel quick relief. It was a man named Hub Beardsley who got the idea for Alka-Seltzer back in 1928, according to Google, and it was Larry Page and Sergey Brin who invented Google, and if you’d been around Palo Alto in 1998 and befriended two nerds and bought them hamburgers, you might be fabulously wealthy today and be weird and miserable, a problem that bromides cannot touch.

A physicist, Dr. Ivan Getting, and an engineer, Col. Bradford Parkinson, are credited as the creators of GPS though it was the U.S. Navy and Dr. Roger Easton at the Naval Research Laboratory who pushed it to completion with a network of satellites with accurate atomic clocks that will guide your car through Tangletown and make it possible for newly arrived immigrants to work as Uber drivers. And so my wife drives and I don’t correct her — I’m not in the business of correcting atomic clocks on satellites — I tell her about the husband and wife driving along and they hit a bridge abutment and in the next moment they’re in heaven and he’s at a heavenly golf course and he hits a hole in one and turns to her and says, “You know, if you hadn’t made me quit smoking, I could’ve been here years ago.”

Someday GPS will be able to tell jokes or answer questions about the history of wherever you’re driving through, which was my job when I rode with my dad from Minnesota to New York City in the summer of 1953: I read to him from the state guides put out by the Federal Writers’ Project in the Thirties, a geo/historical narrative that followed the main roads. So I read: “At 3.1 miles, on the left, is Lincoln State Park where Abraham Lincoln spent his youth from age 7 to 21 and where his mother, Nancy Hanks, is buried in Pioneer Cemetery” and though I was only eleven, I made myself useful to my dad.

The Federal Writers’ Project was part of the Works Progress Administration of FDR’s New Deal and it’s a government program that could be usefully reintroduced today. The purpose was to offer employment to thousands of impoverished writers, but it accomplished more than a handout: it saved thousands of people from writing bad poetry and drippy memoirs and self-conscious fiction and instead to create useful nonfiction that explained the country as you drove through it.

I see this as a turning point in my life: my dad wanted to go to New York City where he’d spent some good years during WW2 working in the Army Post Office on Fifth Avenue. He did not want to take me with him. That was Mother’s idea. She felt that the father of six children should not go gallivanting off to the big city, leaving her at home with three toddlers and a half-acre garden. I was sent along as his ball and chain and he resented it, but he knew she was right, so off we went. And in reading from the FWP guides through Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, I made myself a partner on the trip. We bonded. I read interesting stuff in a loud clear voice for three days straight on two-lane roads. I believe this is where the seeds for my career in radio and as a writer were sown. So every summer I say thank you to the spirit of my mother, Grace, remembering that skinny kid with wire-rim glasses in the front seat of the Pontiac back out of the driveway with a silent father at the wheel and a pile of state guides beside me. He doesn’t know it but he is heading in a lucky direction in life.

The beauty part of being a writer is that once you pass fifty you’re surrounded by piles of unfinished work so you never run out of things to do. Singers start to decline around fifty, hockey players are finished by thirty-two, and most songwriters are done before they ever start. But an old man who writes stories sits down in the morning amid stacks of fragments and first drafts and failures that fortunately avoided publication, and this occupies your morning and you gain the illusion of productivity that gives you license to waste the afternoon on the phone and the evening watching a ballgame. Praise God from Whom all blessings flow, especially those of long ago.

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Good isn’t good enough, seek perfection

I’m in Minnesota where the other day I ate a radish that had a real bite to it, not the tepid politically correct radishes I’ve become accustomed to but a confident self-aware radish like the ones I picked in a truck garden when I was a kid and when the farmer wasn’t looking I’d yank a radish out of the ground, wipe it off on my shirt, and chomp on it and it was thrilling. A red root that warmed your heart.

Not many vegetables are thrilling. Greens aren’t or green peppers, and spuds and squash are only vehicles for butter. Corn, as we know, is a grain, not a veg, so it doesn’t count. I consider tomatoes a fruit but either way, the tomato of today is bred for long shelf life, not for flavor. Beans are beans. This leaves onions and radishes, and the sharp keen-edged radish I bit into the other day was so rare, it made up for the fact that half an hour before I had stood up from looking through the cupboard and slammed my head into the cupboard door. Which is as close to being beheaded as I care to come.

I stood up fast and the sharp sensation of wood on bone made me pause to recall my Social Security number and the address of my childhood home, 312 77th Avenue North, Minneapolis 12, Minn. And Juniper 8-2014, our phone number, to make sure the marbles were intact. But the radish made everything right again. It was fabulous.

Perfection is rare in this world. I look through my hard drive at stories I wrote years ago and I’m happy to delete them, shapeless tasteless compost that they are, compared to which this radish is a Monet water lily. Of course it takes a radish afficionado to recognize it and I am that man. I am also a man who believes the American hamburger is capable of achieving perfection. You need a good bun and a slice of onion, and the burger should be slightly pinkish. Some people ruin it with ketchup. Mustard is what’s required and it should be American mustard, not some Dijon variety. A Dijoned burger is a mistake. You go down that road and you may move to New Canaan and change your name to François Moonbright and your family will have to go to court and get guardianship.

We Minnesotans are a self-effacing people so I’d never say to the guy at the grill, “This hamburger is perfection” because he’d feel obligated to say, “I think I took it off the grill too soon” but nonetheless it is perfect. Cheese would only diminish it. The bun is thin and lightly toasted on the grill. A bite that brings bun, mustard, beef, and onion into the oral cavity simultaneously is a sensation that makes up for whatever worthless things you did today, like my grousing about politics.

It’s a great country and it’s been divided ever since it was founded. My Crandall relatives were loyal to the king and had to high-tail it to Canada, taking only their silverware and the good china, and the men who signed the Declaration that July suffered too, nine of them died in the war, others were bankrupted and left penniless.

Meanwhile, we appreciate perfection in the radish or the limerick: Hooray for Henry Thoreau who lived in the woods long ago and wrote lovely prose while his mom washed his clothes and fixed him hot lunches to go. It’s perfect. So is the stolen base, the double play, the outfielder’s long gallop to deep left center to snatch the fly before it becomes a triple and he turns and tosses the ball over his shoulder into the stands and trots to the dugout having killed the rally and broken the hearts of a quarter-million Yankee fans.

But maybe New York will experience perfection that night in the form of an explosive thunderstorm, bombs bursting in air, lightning strikes, a downpour, sheets of rain, cars stopped in the street. Sunsets are vastly overrated and only make me think of dreadful greeting cards: a thunderstorm is the real thing.

Sometimes sitting in a chair, I feel my wife put her hands on my shoulders and whisper an endearment into my hair, and this small perfect gesture, though you won’t find it in The Joy of Sex, is very moving to me. It’s perfection. When she puts her hands on my shoulder, now that we’re getting older, this gentle affection is a perfect connection in the eyes of me, the beholder. Not perfect but you get the point.

Garrison Keillor © 07.05.22

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A Wednesday drive in the old neighborhood

Another perfect summer and despite all there is to be forlorn about, I feel the same mindless happiness I remember from when I was 20 and running around Minneapolis in a red Mustang with a girl named Maggie and listening to the Cleftones and Cadillacs, the Coasters, the Drifters singing, “Out of the sun, we’ll be havin’ some fun. People walking above, we’ll be making love under the boardwalk.” We had no boardwalk at Lake Calhoun but there were dim places where we sat and necked. She had no plans for me nor did I for her, which was part of the mindlessness. Two young mammals keeping company, enjoying warm weather.

It all came back to me, riding around south Minneapolis Wednesday with my family, looking for the Dairy Queen on 38th Street, two blocks from the Grace & Truth Gospel Hall I attended as a boy in a small separatist sect where I enjoyed the feeling of complete comprehension of absolute truth, from Genesis to Revelation, right up to the age of twelve or thirteen.

Thanks to this upbringing, I have a good ear for the humorless self-righteous and when I got an email from an old friend asking for a donation to a collaborative storytelling collective to create a safe space and healing life-affirming environment for an inclusive group of young people focused on the intentional use of language to deepen self-awareness in the face of stress and trauma, I knew where he was coming from. I don’t object to this, I’m just a harmless old guy cruising around and looking forward to a Dairy Queen.

I did, however, note that in his list of minorities he’d serve, he listed “Dakhota” with a right-leaning accent mark over the o. I’d never seen the word spelled that way and I don’t know how to create that diacritical mark on my computer keyboard. But clearly, though he is white with no Dakhota corpuscles in him that he’s ever mentioned, he was demonstrating his moral superiority as one sensitive to indigenous nuance compared to a bigoted peasant such as myself.

Maggie and I were not inclusive, we were content to be two, both wanting to be writers, and we did tell stories, hers were about bad boyfriends who were too grabby, so I avoided grabbiness and simply held hands and eventually she kissed me and I kissed her back and was careful to make my kisses approximately equal in passion but not try to outdo her. Our safe space was the Mustang and the healing environment was July. In Minnesota you have to suffer a good deal to get to summer and when the perfect days arrive, you owe it to yourself to experience them fully. At the DQ I ordered a medium Butterfinger Blizzard and it was life-affirming.

Lake Calhoun was renamed Bde Maka Ska in honor of the Dakhota and surely it made no sense for Minneapolis to honor John Calhoun, the South Carolinian proponent of slavery and a man with bad hair, but for Maggie and me in the Mustang, the lake had no political significance, it was only a large body of water we looked at as we laid hands on each other. But I’m fine with the name change. Woody Allen was Allan Konigsberg and decided not to be; Allen Ginsberg’s first name was Irwin and a guy named Irwin could not have written “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” he would’ve become an insurance salesman. If Bob Dylan had remained Bob Zimmerman, Columbia Records never would’ve seen him as a poet and visionary and he’d be a cabdriver today. Maybe Maggie has become Starflower Moonbright and is conducting collaborative life-affirming workshops in Fargaux, North Dakhota. I wish her well.

As for me, I am enjoying a mindless summer day in the back seat behind my wife and daughter as we drive through my old neighborhood, eating our Dairy Queens. Some things we know for certain and that’s one. Another is that the two states west of here will never put the h in their names and the right-leaning accent mark over the o. There are good people there but they won’t let Minnesotans tell them how to spell their name. The originalists on the Supreme Court could find that Thomas Jefferson spelled the name with the h and the accent but I say, Live and let live. Enjoy the day. It’s summer.

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Talking on the phone to Joyce and rejoicing

We sat in the sun and played Scrabble Monday and a few minutes later a vulgar four-letter profanity appeared on my letter rack that I could’ve played for 47 points and did not. I just wasn’t in the mood. I’d spoken on the phone that day with Joyce, a preacher and a favorite cousin of mine. Our grandfathers were brothers, and a long-ago rift between them separated our families for decades and I didn’t meet Joyce until I was an old man. This strange story of two stubborn Scots keeping their distance draws me even closer to her. She’s a student of family history and when we talk Jesus comes easily into the conversation with no change of tone of voice, same as you’d mention your brother or father. He is not in a separate universe.

I’ve tried to say the four-letter word several times and I can’t get it to sound natural, not like my two friends who use it often to bold-face what they’re saying. I don’t object. They’re neighbors and Jesus said to love them so I do, mostly, though the word sounds alarming to me like breaking glass. There’s no kindness about it.

Joyce’s grandfather was in the Navy and mine worked for the railroad and they must’ve heard plenty of profanity but never took up the habit. My grandpa, however, was capable of silent anger of an enduring nature, which his children knew and dreaded. My mother as a girl once sat down in the kitchen window and didn’t notice the fresh blueberry pie on the sill and knocked it out on the lawn and she was terrified her dad would berate her for it. He once got angry at her for being too friendly with boys at school and sent her to transfer to a school where she knew nobody. She forgave him and a few years later she had to confess to him that she was pregnant by the boy who would become my father though they hadn’t said their vows yet.

It was 1936, he was still needed on the farm, his father having died three years before, and she was in nurse’s training. They’d been in love for five years and had no money and one day, driving a double team of horses, he almost broke his neck when the horses bolted and the wagon crashed in the ditch, and he was so elated by his survival he wrote her a long letter describing the mishap — the only sustained narrative I ever knew to come out of my father — and he borrowed his brother’s Model A and drove to the city and a few months later she was pregnant. They lied to Grandpa, said they had eloped, and both families were upset but the storm passed. Grandpa’s anger might have exiled her to a home for unwed mothers and my brother Philip would’ve been adopted and I would not have come into existence. But they were forgiven and the story was kept secret by my 21 aunts and uncles and I never found out until my parents were gone and I was an 70-year-old orphan.

Righteous indignation is the easy part of the Christian faith and the hard part is forgiveness. Our country is caught up in ferocious indignation but there is a more merciful culture among us. We know that our country is a haven for the hopeful. We grieve for the migrant workers who died of the heat in the semitrailer that hauled them up from Mexico. We grieve for the pregnant women trapped in an impossible dilemma. The children in room 112 are still on our minds.

What Grandpa never told my mother was that her mother was pregnant for three months before he married her and the indignation of his family was one thing that drove him to leave Scotland and come to America. This is why Joyce and I are keen about family history. Each of us owes our life to a marvelous combination of circumstances, and mercy and kindness and forgiveness are entwined with it.

The righteously indignant are missing out on comedy, which is at the heart of America and which is about forgiveness. Jews don’t recognize Jesus as Messiah, Protestants don’t recognize the pope, and Baptists don’t recognize each other in the liquor store. I heard that joke from a Baptist when I was a kid and I still love it. Jesus broke bread with sinners and Republicans and we should do likewise.

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Here’re your orders: make something beautiful

I woke up this morning and my good woman wasn’t gone, she was asleep beside me, I didn’t feel an aching in my head, no blues around my bed. I made coffee, it tasted fine, not like turpentine. I could put gin in the coffee and make it taste like turpentine but why would I? And that’s how I feel about the Six Supremes who’re trying to take us back to the 19th century. No need to grieve over it, November is coming, and the simple solution is to throw the bums out. Elect a Congress with a two-thirds majority in favor of enlarging the Court to fifteen, which will reverse the reversals. Ninety million eligible voters sat out the 2016 election and that’s how we wound up where we are with this ambitious minority in power.

So you’re depressed by this turn of events. Think of the Six, staying home with the shades pulled, their spouses and children going to the hair salon accompanied by plainclothesmen with a bulge under the jacket. They know that they are widely despised. They avoid eye contact with passersby. I doubt they’re ordering takeout: some worker at Domino’s sees Alito’s name on the order, she is likely to tamper with the pizza. The Six are not attending concerts. No picnics for them. No long car trips except to Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas. Clarence and Ginni surely have close friends but after he announced that the Supremes should take a hard look at gay relationships and contraceptives, he must be thinking about the children and grandchildren of the friends, the boy with his hair in a bun, the girl with the tattoos, and what about the paperboy and the waiters at the country club? And what if he takes a wrong turn and runs into the Pride Parade? They might put him on a rainbow blanket and march down the street tossing him in the air, waving his arms and legs, a ridiculous fate for the Leader of the Pack.

You and I, my dears, can walk freely through town with a clear conscience, enjoy the breeze in the trees and say hi to the cop on the corner. The Six cannot. The cop is not so friendly, imagining everybody carrying a loaded .45 and if he sees one of the six enablers, he might give them the finger, which so far is protected by the First Amendment.

Don’t be disheartened. Deal with the problem. If you’re troubled by inflation, cut back on expenses. Don’t buy sparkling water. Fill up the glass with tap water and if you want bubbles, stick a straw in the water and blow. If you’re depressed by the state of things, skip the news and take a walk beside a large body of water and look at the stars and the moon. The newscaster will say, “Good evening” and then give you fifty-seven reasons why it’s not. Give yourself a break.

The Gang of Six is heading for 1845 and I doubt they’ll get to Prohibition before they fade into the sunset and go down in the WWTT chapter of history (What Were They Thinking). The Six couldn’t find abortion mentioned in the Constitution so they dumped Roe but maybe when they go to their physician to deal with their gloominess, they’ll find a medical originalist with a bucket of leeches who’ll bleed them white and administer powerful purgatives until they’re considerably lighter, and thus they will regain their senses and so will we.

Meanwhile, remind yourself that other people have thrived under wretched governors so don’t be discouraged. The Duke of Saxe-Weimar threw Bach in jail for daring to think he had individual rights. Dante was sent into exile and he wrote the Inferno so he could put the politician Argenti into the Fifth Circle of Hell. Dostoevsky joined a liberal study group for which, in 1849, he was thrown into prison and sentenced to death by firing squad, and was third in line to be executed when a pardon arrived. He lit out for Paris, London, Berlin, and figured out how to survive, writing Crime and Punishment in serial installments for magazines, avoiding politics. While cruelty is in power, do what Mozart did. Exercise your gifts. Create beautiful things. Wolfgang stayed clear of emperors and did his work and he lives on today and the emperors are just moldy names on marble slabs covered with pigeon droppings. If you can’t write The Marriage of Figaro, write your own marriage and make it a work of art.

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A weekend in the wilds of Connecticut

I have seen some of the future lately and I must admit it’s very appealing to me. My wife drives through Connecticut, a woman’s voice in the dashboard directing her along a twisting route through small towns laid out in the 18th century, a street plan designed to frustrate intruders, and my daughter in the back seat FaceTimes her roommate Saamiya who is in India, visiting relatives. My daughter is drawn to people, loves to be in a group, and the phone is her instrument of choice, and soon Marisa joins from London, and Erin in New Jersey, Hindu, Orthodox, and Jewish, joined in small talk. Remarkable to me, not to her.

“Can you feel how smooth the car runs?” my wife says. She took it to a garage for an oil change two days ago and the garage texted her videos of two very worn tires and an engine that needed retuning and she texted back her consent. The cost was steep but the advance info lessened the shock. I wish I’d been at the marketing meeting that came up with that idea.

We come to her family’s old summer house and turn on the AC and I attend to my email, fifty deletions, four replies, and then I post on Facebook a comment on the benefits of being a cancelee in this cancel culture (you find out who your true friends are) that is read and liked by 494 persons. I like this. Back in my day, I could’ve written a letter to the editor of the morning paper about public shaming and friendship, and maybe it would’ve appeared four days later, and maybe two friends would’ve said, “I saw your letter to the editor.” But now, having written three sentences, I find out in a few hours that 494 persons have friendly feelings toward me. A gentle rain on the roof.

How many friends does a person need? Thousands? No, 494 makes me happy. My wife sits on the porch reading an e-book borrowed from the library and then she comes in to show me, on her iPhone, video of the family of foxes cavorting in the woods a hundred feet away. The FaceTiming continues. My wife loves this porch because she sat here with her grandfather and grandmother when she was a little girl. She and her siblings were parceled out singly to the old folks, each kid feeling special in turn. She was cherished on this porch, by the old folks and now again by me. A fox trots across the lawn. Saamiya speaks from India. A general blessedness is in the air.

Other people can dread the future persuasively, and God bless them, but I imagine a world in which people feel drawn together by digital democracy and find a humane commonality, in which life is made simpler in small crucial ways, and meanwhile medicine continues to take great leaps. In two months I shall have a mitral valve replaced by an ace surgical team, most of them half my age, which, assuming success, which of course I do, opens the door to my reaching the age of 97, my mother’s ultimate age, or 101, my editor Roger Angell’s, which would let me see more of the future than I was counting on, a very happy thought.

I’ve been a writer since my mitral valve problem got me excused from football when I was 14 and instead of enduring humiliation at the hands of bigger boys, I wrote sports for the Anoka Herald and my aunt Eleanor read my stuff and said it was good. My parents believed that praising their children would encourage the sin of pride so they didn’t but my aunt took it as her auntly duty, and she was my most athletic aunt and most literate, and she was a force in my life. I’ve never gone to a shrink, I just sit down and write, and this is a gift, along with the blood thinner and the anti-seizure meds and the woman on the porch.

So I’ve canceled my 80th birthday party in August, to which I would’ve invited all 494 of you, because I don’t want COVID to get in the way of the valve replacement that can send me tap-tap-tapping into my nineties. I’m a happy man of simple tastes. If you offered me some super sex, I’d be happy with the soup.

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Just a word about Sunday, then I shut up

Father’s Day is a wonderful joke, a day on which you sit with your brood and someone turns to you and says, “When is Father’s Day? Isn’t it in June?” and you, the father, say, “I have no idea whatsoever.” And that’s the end of it. Mother’s Day is the big deal when tanker ships full of French perfume dock at the bottling plants and four-star restaurants hire extra staff and Father’s Day is the Sunday when someone gives you a bottle of cologne that smells like disinfectant. The price tag is still on it, $1.89.

Women, as we know unless we’re in Texas or in the memory unit, run this world. There was never a single object that a man set down that a woman didn’t reach over and move it. Never a sentence came out of a man’s mouth that a woman didn’t correct. Women decide what we shall eat and what we shall sit on or sleep on, and a man’s opinion is of no more use than that of the family cat. This is a major factor in the popularity of gay marriage: two men decide they want to be free and sleep on cotton sheets and not polyester and have dark brown towels and wear festive colors rather than the prison uniforms women buy for us. The sex is an add-on, mainly it’s about exercising personal taste.

I know, I grew up in a women’s world, the kitchen, and it was great fun. These were Midwestern Christian women but once they got loose of their men, they were funny and loved cooking and tidying up, while the men did the hard work, which was conversing with their sons-in-law.

So don’t give me any cologne, my darlings. Honor your mother who endured excruciating misery and the cruel hands of male obstetricians while your old man watched TV and ate Chinese takeout.

I’m not the man my father John was. He built the house I grew up in, dug the basement, poured concrete, raised the walls, did the plumbing, planted a lawn and garden. I find it challenging to put up a pup tent on flat ground. He was a farm boy. I was a compulsive reader. I put in my time hoeing corn but I gravitated to a nest under the stairs where I read novels and poetry. To my father it was almost as if I were styling around in high heels and nylons. I regret the unhappiness I caused him. We never bonded until he was dying and I brought my little daughter to see him and they bonded instantly, she delighted him, and I got in on her ticket.

Things are different now. Traveling around last week, in and out of airports, it was touching to observe the gentleness of young fathers with small children, their sweetness and patience, a far cry from the brusque tyrants of old. In my boyhood, daddies weren’t cuddlers, they were the warden, chief critic, executive, and it was beautiful to see up close a young dad with a weepy infant in arms and two rambunctious toddlers, speaking kindly to his offspring as he installed them in a row, comforting, encouraging, coaxing. Back in my day, dads were enforcers of high standards to which their children aspired but inevitably failed leaving an embittered pater consoling himself with a bottle of Scotch, and now a loving style of fatherhood predominates. This bodes well for humanity.

Nonetheless, it strikes me as wasteful to set aside a Sunday in June to honor ejaculation. Put fatherhood together with motherhood for Mom & Dad Day in May and maybe start a new day in June in honor of underlings, minions, employees, offspring, in recognition of the fact that leaders learn from people below them on the organization chart. Many clerks have brought up their bosses to be decent human beings. I’ve learned a great deal from fan letters, e.g., what they omit. There is nothing so instructive as standing in front of a group of people you’re supposed to teach. You learn about comedy from listening to the laughter. Parenting skills are taught by small children.

Maybe on Underling Day you’d turn society upside down and put the inmates in charge of the asylum. I don’t know. When I divorced his mother, my son, who was seven, said, “Why can’t you and Mom take turns being right?” I still haven’t answered that question.

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