Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 37

Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit a shirt

As a Midwesterner, I was brought up to be self-effacing and make no demands of anybody. I don’t honk, I don’t wave at the waiter who’s ignoring me, I don’t want to be a problem. Offer me ranch or blue cheese dressing, I say, “Whatever is easier for you, whichever you have more of, whatever nobody else wants.” “Just choose, damn it,” the host says, and I’m tempted to ask for blue cheese but I don’t want to if it deprives someone else of blue cheese who is on the edge of the cliff already and, denied his dressing, might harm himself. “We have plenty of both,” the host says. But now I’m wondering, “What do I have against ranch? Is it my antipathy to cowboy mythology and the fetishization of guns?” And the host screams, “CHOOSE!” And I ask him, “Which one has less impact on the environment?” And he shows me to the door and locks it after me.

Self-effacement is rare in New York where I live. People don’t go around meeking each other as they do back in Minnesota, because here, the Christian faith is an oddball item, as it was in Jesus’s time. It’s a city of Jews and Muslims and Buddhists and a million people who moved here to escape from fundamentalist families, plus other minorities, Sodomites and Gomorrhians, and the people who designed the Tower of Babel and went into the practice of law.

Jesus did not say, “Blessed are they who dominate the conversation.” So we don’t. We listen. We nod. I attend an Episcopal church but I never stay for the social hour afterward because, having grown up fundamentalist, I have no social skills. I was brought up to avoid people for fear they’d lead me astray and so I have no idea how to open up a conversation with a stranger. What to say?

THEM: How are you?
ME: Fine. Can’t complain.

Contentment is a conversation killer in New York. Complaint is an art form here. If you aren’t in a serious struggle with the world, you don’t have a life. Maybe it’s an evil neighbor in your co-op who refuses to admit that smoke from his fireplace is giving your wife asthma or the upstairs neighbors who’ve taken up clog-dancing or surely you’ve seen a miserable movie or read a nitwit novel or heard about a prestigious prize given to a piece of pigeon poop. And even if your road in life is smooth, you can still bitch about the unindicted crook who did outrageous things in broad daylight and still attracts crowds of yahoos in states with the lowest average SAT scores.

But not me. I am content.
I’m 79 and 5/6ths. It’s the age of gratitude. No more need for long-term planning. No need to be hip or cool or whatever the current word for “cool” is. I have no idea who is famous anymore and I don’t get the jokes. It doesn’t matter. Less is more: what matters is time. At this age you automatically become a Buddhist and give up ambition and discover the quiet contemplative place within your soul and stop being a big jerk.
As I write this I am sitting in the airport. I’ve come through security and the TSA woman, seeing the shoes on my feet, asked if I’m 75, which was terribly kind of her. I look like I’m 85 and have been disinterred. And then she said, “One of your shoelaces in untied.” I wanted to throw my arms around her but did not lest I be arrested for assault. I came through the scanner and the TSA guy did not grope my groin. My computer bag was not taken apart. I sat down in a café and enjoyed a croissant. The waiter offered to refill my coffee cup. This is the sort of kindness an old dog takes sustenance from. My email is full of messages of impending doom and I can read them tomorrow but not now. Emails about the future of American democracy: give it a break. Let God guide us through the night with a light from above and the sun will come out tomorrow. That’s good enough for now. Start worrying about the long-term future and there’ll be no end to it. If it rains, start singing. Right now I’ve got a plane to catch, back to New York. When I get there, I’m going to buy a quart of blue cheese dressing and put my name on it in big blue letters.

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Looking down the road, seeing the future

It would appear that five of the Supremes are favoring an absolute right to possess any weaponry whatsoever by whoever has the cash, and to bear arms without restriction in schools, churches, shopping centers, aboard airliners, in the courtroom itself, that a right is a right, period. And when the Executive Quintet opens those doors, we’ll see dramatic changes here in the land of the free and home of the brazen, such as the man police apprehended carrying a gun near Justice Kavanaugh’s home last week, with intent to do harm.

We have 400 million guns now and when we get up to a billion, there will be more men with guns than police can apprehend, and it’s safe to say that no parent will send children to school, even one with armed guards. Law enforcement has been overwhelmed in many cities, including Minneapolis, where police have begun to privatize themselves and hire out as freelance security. Education, I suppose, will move online. Millions of people will become consultants and work out of their homes; manufacturing will all go to China. The closing of schools will likely mean the end of interscholastic sports except fencing, sharpshooting, and bowling, which may be useful for self-defense.

Guns will be sold online and delivered by armored truck. When the number of guns hits two billion, gunfire will be as common as rainfall except constant, day and night.

Republicans will own most of the weapons and Democrats, as we know, can’t shoot straight. And Republicans will amend the Second Amendment to abridge the gun rights of trans people, critical race theory people, Planned Parenthood supporters, ACLU members, Unitarian Universalists, and undocumented immigrants except those engaged as farm or slaughterhouse workers. Jews will still have gun rights but they won’t enjoy those rights, they never did enjoy them, and so Jews may head for Canada, which means a sharp decline in philanthropy. Colleges and orchestras will suffer, opera companies will go under.

I must admit that none of this affects me particularly since I live in a 12th-floor apartment and I keep the shades drawn. It would take an awfully lucky shot to get me.

What troubles me is my Episcopal church. These are urbane Anglophiles, and so they’re not going to carry rifles on Sunday, lest they be mistaken for Baptists. And no pistols since we are Episcopalians, not Epistolarians. My people will try to protect themselves by high-minded pacifism and will come to church wearing only a breechcloth to show that they’re unarmed, and also to show solidarity with indigenous people. I, however, intend to come to church fully armed and carrying a ballistic shield. My problem is that our church is likely to draw a great many Presbyterians and Methodists trying to escape their armed co-believers, and I would not feel comfortable among Christians opposed to same-sex marriage and the ordination of women. Our rector is a woman and if Methodists came in and wrecked her ministry, we would be (pardon my French) up Merde River.

Yes, I could attend church by Zoom, but it’s not the same. Church is a place of deep emotion for me. I don’t cry at movies, but I do cry at church. The line from the psalm, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.” (Some people believe “rod” refers to a firearm but I doubt it.) I weep at the promise of resurrection. I go to pieces when we sing the hymn “I Am the Bread of Life” and I see old Episcopalians, men in pinstripe suits and bow ties and wingtip shoes, raising their hands up like Pentecostals when we sing, “And I will raise them up in the last day.” A few weeks ago we sang, “Shall we gather at the river where bright angels’ feet have trod” and my voice broke, I couldn’t sing. You miss out on this when you watch on Zoom, the sense of fellow feeling with other believers.

I am willing to kill in defense of my right to feel emotional fellowship. Shoot if you must, you SOB, but not during prayer or hymnody or when the Holy Word is read, or you’ll go down in a hail of lead. Go shoot some horned or furry mammalian, don’t come after this Episcopalian. Even as I sing God’s praises, you’ll go down as my six-gun blazes. I’m a Christian but I carry heat: next stop for you is the Judgment Seat.

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The meaning of life as it dawned on me the other night

I enjoy writing this column every week but how would you know that, me being from Minnesota, from stoical people, brought up to bite our tongue and persevere through suffering, and if pleasure occurs, be patient, it will soon pass. In other parts of the country, our stoicism would be diagnosed as depression. Sedatives are pretty much wasted on us. Joy is a word on Christmas cards, not used in conversation. At games, the cheerleaders only try to keep the crowd awake, and if our team wins, we think, “Well, I guess it could’ve been worse and next time it probably will be.”

We’re people of few words and that’s why we’ve produced very few writers. Fitzgerald was an Easterner born in St. Paul by mistake and he left as soon as he could and never returned. The poet Robert Bly’s big book was Silence in the Snowy Fields, which pretty much says it all, and then he wrote Iron John about plumbing. As for Louise Erdrich, she grew up in North Dakota.

We were a center of high tech years ago but the idea of email and iPhone never occurred to us and instead of computers, we have Hormel, which manufactures Spam. So our brightest minds fled west and now we’re the No. 1 producer of turkeys, a high-strung bird with an itty-bitty brain and an enormous torso. Forty million turkeys in this state, and they are prone to panic and their bodies are bred too big for their tiny ankles and so in a thunderstorm, when thousands of them run flapping in terror across the feedlot, they’re likely to break a leg and have to be decapitated and made into lunchmeat. No wonder they seem so depressed.

We, however, are not turkeys, you and I, and for this we are thankful and not only at Thanksgiving. We are not a herd creature. In large crowds, of course, we go with the flow and go down the Down stairway and exit through the door marked This Way Out, but nonetheless we are independent individuals and we can discern what is true, what is noble and right, what is lovely and admirable and to think on these things.

I think back to my college days and the fascination of the literary crowd with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and how it was declared a classic and now it looks like a lurid blood-bucket story told from the point of view of the killers, not much sympathy for the rural Kansas family that was shot down. If you wrote a book about the Uvalde massacre sympathetic to the shooter, you’d be run out of town. Hundreds of mass shootings have turned the tide.

The world of herd fandom is odd. I go to a concert and sit through two hours of incoherent noise and leave, surrounded by fans stunned by genius. I feel odd about many Republicans (“Guns don’t kill people.”) and the fevers of progressive lefties who will object if you refer to gypsy moths on the grounds it’ll make Romani people feel marginalized.

It is a foolish goose who attends the Coyote Covenant Church. We meet each other as individuals, my friend, and we show due respect and mind our manners and we make small talk and then perhaps larger talk and I ignore some thoughtless remark and we press on. Arrogance is deadly, a good heart counts for a great deal, true feeling is a beam of light, and maybe a bond of friendship is struck, but if a crowd gathers of bristling feathers and big chests and tiny heads with sharp beaks, then I am out of here and on my way.

Life goes on, great plans crash on the rocks, there is no such thing as 24-hour dry cleaning so get over it, that dog won’t hunt, and the printer prints gibberish and you ask Alexa for Chopin and she thinks you’re going shopping, and yet — last night, sitting holding my love’s hand, the phone rang and it was an old friend I hadn’t spoken to in ages and nothing has changed, we talk and it’s music. If I drove up there tomorrow, I’d be welcome. This and her and a cup of ginger tea and a novel in progress are all this man requires. That and six glasses of water and regular flossing.

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Recovering from disaster, thanks to my heroes

I’ve been writing nagging hectoring columns about malfeasance in high places lately, and now it’s time to admit I left the water running in the shower three weeks ago and it leaked down to two apartments below us and caused water damage and now insurance adjustors are working out a settlement and I am required to wear a hazard-orange vest with IN THE EVENT OF ERRATIC BEHAVIOR, CALL — and my wife’s phone number written on the back. I distinctly remember turning the water off, but plaster damage below us says otherwise. So I’m not going to write about the federal judge who threw out the mask mandate that led to the steep rise in COVID cases. I have my own problems.

My wife is a forgiving person. She has not filed for guardianship. She kicks my butt at Scrabble but she’s gracious about it. She rations my bacon cheeseburgers. She tells me if I look bedraggled so I don’t walk down the street and people hand me spare change. And she turns out the light at night and rolls over and puts her arms around me. This is better than a Pulitzer Prize. So I don’t wake up in the morning with an aching in my head and the blues all around my bed and the water tastes like turpentine because my good gal left me here cryin’. She didn’t. She has made coffee and she has read the morning paper so that I don’t need to. When you skip the news, life is a lot more like Anne of Green Gables or The House at Pooh Corner.

I shall take a break from high dudgeon. A man who leaves the shower running needs to give outrage a rest. So I find myself in a sort of second childhood. People are friendly to me because they sense that I’m harmless. The young woman in the coffee shop smiles and says, “What can I get you, my friend,” and this makes my day. As Tennessee Williams said, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

I don’t comprehend the anger you see out there in America. The truckers’ convoy, yes; driving big trucks is a miserable hard life, but the biker brigades who come roaring through town louder than a 757, bulky men with graying ponytails wearing leather, flying the flag and bearing vulgar right-wing bumper stickers, these are suburban sociopaths who just want to be noticed — but to what end? These are expensive bikes, the riders are well-fed, what’s their beef? Just because you’ve wasted forty years on adolescence, it’s not too late to get a life.

A man needs heroes to light the way. One of mine is the cardiologist who performed a heart catheterization on me recently in an OR with a team of men and women and the powerful sense of competence in that room was impressive to me, the man who left the water running. Another hero is my editor Roger Angell who died at the age of 101, the graciousness of his life, his classiness, the joy he took in his old age right up to the end, the happiness of his writing.

Another is Duke Ellington — long gone from the world but you can go on YouTube and he’s there in force, “Take the A Train” and “Mood Indigo,” his Sacred Concerts and “Caravan” — who toured the country with his 15-piece orchestra, playing ballrooms packed with his fans, a dance floor where people could jitterbug swing. This was back when segregation was still in force and the band never knew if they could get a hotel room or a meal in a restaurant. They were all Black, but Juan Tizol, the trombonist, was fairly light-skinned and had to wear blackface so nobody would think the band was integrated.

Ellington was elegant and cool and he didn’t deign to address bigotry — he just played right through it. He’s famous for his band compositions but I love his solo stuff, the man was a great pianist.

Not all that much has changed in the fifty years since Duke died. There’s rampant craziness in the country still, but Duke’s example is worth copying: ignore the hatred and create something great. The old Southern segregationist senators are gone and forgotten and Duke lives on, an American treasure. Anger dies; genius endures. He came out of ragtime and into swing and was unaffected by rock ’n’ roll and is flying along still.

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Some news, as we know, is realer than others

Uvalde stays in the mind despite all distractions, a pleasant day at a little summer house in Connecticut and Scrabble on the porch and the drive back to Manhattan on the Merritt Parkway with its arched stone bridges dating back to the days when families went for a “drive” for pleasure — it stays because it is so real. I don’t understand economics, Ukraine is far away, climate change is an abstraction, but the terrified parents across the street from their kids’ school hearing gunshots, they are real, and I have a great-niece who is the same age as the kids in room 112 and I imagine her as the girl who lay on the floor among dead classmates and called 911 and said, “Send the police now, please.” That is my niece, a lively independent spirited girl who loves reading and bonds with her grandma and eats like a trucker but is thin as a rail thanks to the intensity of her life. That girl has a name, like the kids in Texas.

The teachers Eva and Irma are real. They are my fourth-grade teachers, Miss Carroll and Mrs. Moehlenbrock. The Border Patrol trooper in the hallway who said to his two colleagues, “Let’s get this done,” and the three of them burst into 112, I know men who would’ve done that. The shooter is completely unreal, a blank shadow.

It’s tragic that he didn’t know about the NRA convention a few days later, he could’ve gone to Houston and found himself among like minds and gotten some of the hatred out of his system. They’re in favor of assault weapons and so was he. They share a similar mental illness, except that he knew what automatic rifles are for and they deny it. The weapon isn’t for hunting or sharpshooting or self-defense: it’s designed to spray a great deal of lead and kill as many people as possible. It should be illegal.

I pity the paranoid Second Amendment crowd with the AR-15s in the front hall closet so they can defend themselves against leftist public school teachers coming to inject them with critical race theory vaccine or false-flag Girl Scouts selling cookies that contain transgender virus. It’s a miserable life, shades drawn, meeting fellow lunatics in secret websites, aware that the FBI has tapped your phone and is sending info to George Soros. The rest of us enjoy a picnic among the rhododendrons and mountain laurel, no pistols in our picnic baskets, no ammo belt under our T-shirt, and we feel more attached to our cellphones than to our weaponry.

Life is good in this beautiful country that God has blessed, and the paranoids in our midst are missing out on all the best stuff. The shooting range is a grim place compared to a ball game. At a ball game, you have women and children and other normal Americans, there’s bratwurst and ice cream and peanuts, you sit enjoying the chit-chat of your neighbors, amused by some humorous hairstyles, waiting for some astonishing feat, a center fielder leaping high to snag a would-be home run for the third out, bases loaded, or the classic ballet of the SS-2B-1B double play. At the shooting range, there’re only weird men with homicidal fantasies blowing holes in paper targets. What’s the pleasure?

The gun fetishists who talk about needing guns to defend against the government are talking nonsense: the insurrectionists who took over the Capitol in 2021 didn’t bother to bring their AR-15s because they already own the government, having the U.S. Senate in their back pocket and the Supreme Court. There was no need for artillery; they own fifty senators and so nobody will interfere with their right to own tommy guns. You can’t own heavy mortars or surface-to-air missiles that could bring down an airliner, but in another ten years, who knows? The odds are on your side.

The right wing holds power but holding power leads to the fear of losing power. You walk down the street, packing heat, bulky in your armored vest and jockstrap, and you see liberals behind every bush and tree microwaving leftism into your brain. It is not a good life.

I want to believe the girl who called 911 survived that horror. I hope she has a peaceful summer among people who love her and grows up and finds her mission in life and gets out of Texas and has a good life and that the horror fades and that eventually a May 24 comes along when she forgets to grieve.

 

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What we know is not nearly enough

Of the ten worst mass shootings in America in recent history, five have taken place in Texas, so it was brave of Governor Abbott to go to Uvalde after the massacre of nineteen fourth-graders by an 18-year-old high school dropout with two newly bought AR-15s who had a whole hour to kill the kids and two teachers. The grief of a gun-lobby governor seemed rather thin but he went because he had to.

The hour delay between the first call to 911 and the shooting of the shooter was not explained in the media. A team of three Border Patrol troopers, carrying a ballistic shield, broke into the classroom at last and the shooter was exterminated.

Videos from Uvalde showed scores of heavily armed cops walking around, bearing assault rifles, bulky in their armored vests, even an armored vehicle outside the Robb Elementary School. For a moment I thought it was a scene from Ukraine, but no.

The list of the dead were mostly Hispanic names, Rodriguez, Garcia, Lopez, Garza, Torres. Sources said the teachers Eva Mireles and Irma Garcia loved their kids dearly and died defending them. Nineteen kids, killed. Many of them were so severely shot up that authorities had to ask grieving parents for DNA samples so the bodies could be identified. The justice of the peace who had to write the death certificates collapsed in grief. A nation is horrified. We accept street shootings in sketchy neighborhoods, but 10-year-old kids trapped in a classroom, the screaming, the panic, some kids jumping out of windows, it’s unbearable. The agonized parents, the terrorized kids, the lingering effects of fear in the lives of ordinary people for years to come. The sign “Bienvenidos” in the schoolyard.

The governor said it was not a political issue, that evil is everywhere, that gun control is not the answer. Senator Lee of Utah who has voted against mandatory gun registration said that “glorification of violence” and “breakdown of the family” are responsible for the shooting, and how do you address those? Censorship of Netflix and Hulu? Requiring regular church attendance? Senator Romney said, “Grief overwhelms the soul. We must find answers.” Apparently he feels that prayer is an answer, but it’s dismaying to see, according to Newsweek, that Romney has received $14 million in donations from the National Rifle Association over the years. Evidently his soul was not sufficiently overwhelmed.

Perhaps we will see the serious fortifying of schools, churches, shopping centers, and where do you stop? It would be an expensive proposition, but to give one deranged 18-year-old such power over the psyches of millions is intolerable, so perhaps you pay ten or twenty or thirty thousand armored men to stand in doorways. Perhaps the sheer expense would convince Republican senators that gun registration with background checks is a good idea.

The president spoke Tuesday night and pointed out that other countries have mentally ill persons as we do but none seem to have so many mass shootings. Montreal had one in 1989 and Nova Scotia another in 2020, even after Canada banned assault weapons. A U.S. federal ban on sale of assault weapons that passed narrowly during the Clinton administration expired in 2004. A federal judge in California overturned that state’s ban on assault weapons, comparing the AR-15 to a Swiss army knife. A bill for gun registration and background checks, which the House approved narrowly, may be brought up again in the Senate after Memorial Day but is not expected to pass, given the reality of a filibuster.

I had a dear friend who took up gun ownership seriously and believed it was necessary in order to defend against a leftist takeover of the country. For a while, we tried to avoid talking about this but the subject kept coming up. The friendship ended. I still miss him. He was funny, loyal, a sweet guy, and the gun obsession changed him.

Apparently we are two countries, and in one, it’s considered normal to go around armed with a gun, and in the other it’s considered weird. I happen to be fond of Texas but I live in New York because if someone steps onto a New York subway train carrying an AR-15, it’s considered terrifying; it’s not a Swiss army knife. So I live here, not there. Freedom is not an abstract idea, it includes the openness of society, the happiness of walking wherever curiosity takes you and of mingling with strangers, getting a feel of community.

I propose that Mr. Lee and Mr. Romney take the $14 million and use it to make nonviolent TV shows that glorify good families. I wish them well. Meanwhile, I don’t care to do any shows in Texas.

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Time to head for the graveyard and pay respects

Memorial Day is soon upon us, a day that is personal to veterans of foreign wars and rather abstract to us freeloaders and draft dodgers, and seldom the twain shall meet, but this Day is one of those occasions. I speak as one who got a notice from my draft board to report for induction back in 1967 and I wrote to them and said I was opposed to the war and wouldn’t go, and somehow the matter disappeared and the FBI never knocked on my door.

A classmate of mine, Henry Hill, died in Vietnam, in Quang Ngai, at the age of 24, a star athlete and class president, a first lieutenant, infantry commander, died of multiple fragmentation wounds, and I think, “The Army was unable to turn this guy into a deadly killer. He thought he was still on the football team.” I don’t feel responsible for Henry’s death, I think Robert McNamara, Lyndon Johnson, and Hubert Humphrey were, and plenty of others who knew what was going on.

We honor Henry for answering the call. There surely were ways he could’ve avoided it. He could’ve found a friendly doctor to find something wrong with him. He was a bright guy and he was Black, he could’ve applied for some advanced training program for which his smarts and race and personality would’ve been prominent assets, but he went with his infantry unit to Vietnam. The nation depended on men like him in 1861 and 1941, the two Good Wars, but the call was the same for the mistaken wars, and those who answered are deserving of equal honor.

Lincoln stood on a platform on the field at Gettysburg in November 1863, four and a half months after the great battle, and while he referred to the “honored dead,” he knew that it had taken the whole four months to make the battlefield decent, that when Lee’s army yielded the field in the heat of July, the Union Army followed close on his tail, and the bodies of thousands of dead lay torn and twisted, swollen, rotting, eventually to be laid in shallow trenches covered with a few inches of dirt, where pigs and wild dogs found them and dragged them out to be chewed upon until finally decent burial took place in the fall, which was not even complete when Lincoln arrived on November 19.

He was sick with smallpox, feverish, had a severe headache, and sat for hours listening to dreadful music and a pompous speech by a gasbag named Edward Everett (“Standing beneath this serene sky, overlooking these broad fields now reposing from the labors of the waning year, the mighty Alleghenies dimly towering before us, the graves of our brethren beneath our feet, it is with hesitation that I raise my poor voice,” it begins and goes on for two hours), and then Lincoln delivered his remarks, not even 300 words, in a weak voice, muffled by the restless crowd, numb after Everett’s effusions.

The country was weary of war and ready to sue for peace and a year later Lincoln would’ve lost the election to George McClellan who would’ve settled with the Confederacy and we’d be two nations today, but Sherman’s advance through Georgia and the fall of Atlanta swung the election to Lincoln, and here we are, divided again, confused as ever, gasbags on every hand, mendacious politicians, demagogues, grandstanders, but what Lincoln said that day is even more true now: it is up to us the living to give the nation a new birth so that Henry Hill and all the others did not die in vain.

I think the conservative Mitt Romney has a good point when he says it’s no time to transform America, that we need to reunite the country, which means paying attention to public safety, public health, schools, jobs, infrastructure, which doesn’t lend itself to high-flying oratory but it’s what we all need. Government by a few people for the benefit of some of their people is a dishonor to the dead. Let’s do better.

I write this from Minneapolis, not far from where Henry and I attended high school, a city that got hit hard by COVID and crime and a loss of confidence in city government, which is all Democratic. The happiest place in town is the Twins’ ballpark, a friendly place where you feel safe and can rub elbows with your fellow Minnesotans, and otherwise there’s a sense of unease that calls for a rebirth of freedom to move around and live your life without fear. This is not my problem, I’m irrelevant, the city belongs to the young parents with little kids and mortgage payments, and I’d gently suggest that a conservative Mormon might be a good choice for mayor. Just a thought.

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Time is more like it used to be than it was before

I have suddenly become very easygoing thanks to the black hole in our galaxy out near the constellation Sagittarius that astronomers have provided pictures of, a mass equivalent to four million suns, temps in the trillions, with a gravitational force that bends time, which has given me a larger perspective and made me less intolerant of those who say “less” when they mean “fewer” or those who misuse “who” and “whom,” of whom I know a few, plus aggressive drivers, over-friendly waiters, misplaced glasses, spam, a great many formerly irritating things are less so thanks to this new information and I’m grateful to whomever and whoever provided it.

It’s an enormous universe we’re floating around in. We thought it was a big deal to put men on the moon, but in the greater scale of things, that’s like going out the front door to the mailbox. We’re adrift in a sea of endless ignorance and to me this says, “Enjoy your insignificance. Be contented with what you have.” I have a cup of black coffee, a laptop computer, a grandfather clock whose pendulum ticks off the time without bending it, and from the next room I hear my wife getting dressed. She is an independent woman, curious, venturing, an observer of humanity, who never depended on me for entertainment though we do enjoy each other’s company. For me, she intensifies time greatly, which is even better than bending.

Here in Minnesota time bends often and we may get snow on Opening Day of baseball season or a heat wave in December and we become a cold rainy Georgia. So we’re accustomed to disappointment. What’s bewildering is success. Our parents didn’t prepare us for that. They taught us to endure. So when, as sometimes happens, there is something to celebrate, we are torn: will our jubilation be seen as prideful? Will it be a trigger for people whose self-esteem is low? So we stifle ourselves.

I am facing this problem with my 80th birthday coming up in a few months. I’m a medical miracle. Had I been born thirty years earlier, I’d have died fifty years ago. I should charter a plane and fly my family and several Mayo doctors to a Pacific island with zero light pollution where we can lie at night and be amazed by the trillion brilliant pinpoints of the Milky Way and maybe see Sagittarius and feel young and giddy, but I won’t, and if people congratulate me, I’ll say, “Well, I’ve been lucky so far but you never know, there’s probably a pizza deliveryman out there fated to intersect with me and I’ll perish in a pile of pepperoni.”

I suppose the black hole out there is a challenge to Christian faith, to believe that the Creator of the black hole with its four million suns (which is thought to be one of the smaller black holes in the universe) also sent His Son to this planet to tell people, “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” assuming that the kingdom includes those four million suns. It is a great deal for the mind to grasp, especially mine, which in recent weeks has been trying to clear my shelves of unread books that I’ll never read, due to vision problems that make small type illegible due to immaculate degeneration.

By my age, however, faith is a settled matter. Unbelief happens in your twenties and you go along enjoying cool incredulity until something happens, the birth of a child, visions of starry sky, perhaps a grasshopper landing in your palm and eating sugar left over from your cookie and then flying away, and you wander into church and fall in with a bunch of believers, and see as through a glass, darkly, but have faith that someday we’ll behold God face to face.

Meanwhile, time is foreshortened. My middle years are a muddle of chronology, but childhood scenes are in clear focus, the thrill of tobogganing down a steep hill and out onto the frozen Mississippi, the girl in seventh grade who challenged me to wrestle and threw me down and kissed me on the lips. I didn’t resist. And then there was the lunch at Dock’s restaurant thirty years ago where I met a woman and we talked for three hours and we’ve been talking ever since. She is funnier than I and if she ever writes a memoir about our marriage, I think you’ll be well entertained. In fact, I’m writing a blurb now. “The only reason I’d come back to Earth would be to read this book.”

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If you want a story, sit down and I’ll find one for you

Storytelling is an art of necessity that you learn when you are young and come home rather late from lying in the grass with Corinne in her backyard talking and holding her hand, your head on her shoulder, observing the slight rise of her breasts as she breathes, and your mother is at the door, wanting an explanation, and rather than get Corinne on your mother’s list of Temptresses, you invent a story in which you were hitchhiking and a drunk picked you up and he was a veteran of D-Day, wounded by the Nazis in defense of democracy, a good man fallen on hard times, and he was too drunk to drive so you took the wheel and drove him home and listened to his long list of troubles and then had to walk home. True? No. Sinful? Hardly.

Storytelling is crucial in panhandling, something I’ve never done but who knows what the future may hold? A bedraggled couple approach in a parking lot, pushing a baby stroller, and say, “Do you have any money?” This is not a good opening line. You need to say, “I’m sorry but my wife and I came down from Bemidji and slept in the park and our money was stolen during the night and we need to take our baby to University Hospital because he needs to take a blood test. Can you spare twenty dollars for cabfare?” This is a plausible tale, your speaking in whole sentences suggests you’re a reasonable person, not stoned on drugs, and you’ve made a specific request. And there’s a baby in the stroller.

President Biden came to Minneapolis to speak at a memorial service for Walter Mondale and he told a story about his arrival at the Senate at the age of 30, soon after the death of his wife and little girl in a car crash, and how Walter and Joan Mondale befriended him, a genuine loving friendship in the midst of a great deal of false bonhomie, and it was a fine story. The humanity of the man was put forward. People need to see this. There is so much slashing and trashing in public discourse that bears no relationship to reality, it’s all special effects and puppetry.

Say what you will about social media, Facebook is where we go to see video clips of my twin grandnieces Ivy and Katherine scootching around on a blanket on the floor of Hieu and Jon’s apartment in Ho Chi Minh City, two tiny girls who will see the 21st century that I will miss out on, but I need to offer them some family history, since their last name is Keillor too. I could tell them about my grandma Dora Powell and her twin sister, Della, who learned Morse code as children so they could give each other answers to questions on tests. After they grew up, they became railroad telegraphers, under the name D. Powell, sharing one uniform, working morning and evening shifts, and then Dora taught in a country school and boarded with a farmer, James Keillor and his widowed sister Mary, across the road. She could see he was a well-read man who loved history and poetry, and one day he crossed the road to school and proposed marriage and, as she said, she “walked away but not so fast that he couldn’t catch me,” and they kissed and he hitched the horses to the carriage and drove to town and found a man to marry them, and that’s where we come from. They fell in love through dinner-table conversation.

My parents, John and Grace, fell in love in 1931, a farmboy and a city girl, and he courted her by singing hymns with the word “grace” in them. They were in love for five years, unable to marry, no money, needed at home, and one day, driving a double team of horses to haul manure to spread on a relative’s field, coming down a steep hill, the horses bolted and John couldn’t hold them and they galloped wildly home and the wagon crashed in a ditch and he was thrown clear, and after he chased down the horses, he borrowed a car and drove to the city and married Grace. Lying in the ditch, his neck not broken, he felt God’s grace shining on him and against the opposition of both families, the two lovers claimed each other without hesitation. We are soft-spoken stoics, modest to a fault, but capable of deep feeling. We love you girls in Vietnam both dearly.

 

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What are fathers for? Anybody’s guess

I took my love to dinner last Sunday and told her what an excellent mother she is and it’s absolutely true, I observed her in action all those years, driving our child to appointments, reading to her, rocking her to sleep, listening to her anxieties, attending numerous meetings with teachers, but then the question of my fatherhood arises and I am pleading the Fifth, so no questions, please, I’m well aware of my inadequacies.

I’m not proud, but after my first cup of coffee, when I sit down at the laptop, my self-esteem problems go away. This is the beauty of writing, it takes the mind off one’s failures, failure is simply valuable material for comedy, and thanks to my long-standing habit of never reading my own books, I am perpetually hopeful. When I sit down to write, I am 27 again. Everything is possible.

I made a living in radio and writing fiction, neither of which demand strong character. And now I’m embarked on a new career as an octogenarian stand-up and when I say to the audience: “There was an old man of Bay Ridge who cried out, ‘Sonuvabitch! I got up in the night and on came the light and I find I have peed in the fridge’” and the audience laughs aloud, even the Lutherans, I’m completely unselfconscious. I got the laugh and that’s more than enough, it doesn’t matter that I wear this face of failed fatherhood. Maybe the f.o.f.f. is an asset in comedy.

Vanity is useless for a man my age, like walking around with a bowling ball. Set it down. Get over yourself. A child who has an excellent mother is going to be okay, the father can go write novels. My dad was a good man but he had six kids and I cannot recall a single time when he sat down and had an earnest conversation with me, he was busy working two jobs and tending his garden. So I found surrogate fathers such as Uncle Don and Mr. Faust my history teacher and Bob Lindsay who taught journalism and Irv Letofsky at the paper where I worked and my editor Roger Angell, and that is a great wealth of fatherliness, one really can’t ask for more.

A few town mothers in my hometown were responsible for the cultural life, whatever there was, and then the town fathers destroyed all the magnificent 19th-century buildings, the Carnegie library, the county courthouse, several fine churches, some downtown business blocks, and replaced them with generic boxes. Our great-grandfathers had sought to ennoble the commoners and our fathers trashed the place, and now it’s a hollow shell in the suburban sprawl. You could drive through it and never notice it’s there. So I never go back.

Some things you need to do for yourself, no father can help. I quit a three-pack-daily smoking addiction one day and it disappeared in about a week. I discarded alcohol on my own. I was afraid of being a hopeless alkie, someone who can’t quit booze, so I quit rather than be hopeless. I didn’t want to go to AA and hear sad stories and have to tell my own, so I skipped ahead to sobriety.

When COVID appeared, my love and I went into semi-isolation and the clock became irrelevant, and after decades of hecticity, COVID gave us the simple peasant life of couplehood in our thatched hut of a New York apartment. I was a failed father but I aim to be a good husband. The woman deserves no less. I even wrote her a poem.

M is for her double gin martini.
O is for the onyx diamond pin.
T is for the tiny black bikini.
H is for her handbag, leopardskin.
E is for the emeralds on her finger.
R is for her brand-new red Ferrari.
I’m her lover, writer, passenger, and singer,
And for my failures I am truly sorry.

Father’s Day is sometime in June, I forget when, because we’ve never observed it. Compared to pregnancy and childbirth, the donation of sperm is incidental. She heard the cry from the crib and went up and rocked the child to sleep and I heard the siren call of notoriety and hit the road and wrote on planes and in hotel rooms and walked onstage and did monologues and loved the whole long trek and was it worth it? The jury is still deliberating. But when the woman walks into the room and puts her hands on the man’s shoulders, it’s a beautiful day already.

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