Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 38

Lying on my side in dim light, watching

I was at Mayo last week where, after years of providing urine specimens and taking a deep breath and holding it and various medical adventures, I feel like an old alum and the lab tests show that through no fault of my own I am in fairly good shape, walking upright and making sense fantabuli octopi magnanimous anthropods or not making sense if I choose.

It’s a friendly caring place where they hand you an iPad in the waiting room so you can answer questions Minnesotans would be embarrassed to ask anyone, such as “Are you being abused by your spouse or partner?” or “Are you unable to afford food or housing?” A simple way for people with serious trouble to raise a red flag.

One question they leave out is, “Have you taken up all of the bad habits you felt were required of a serious American author?” which applies in my case.

I first came to Mayo in 2001, thanks to my cousin Dr. Dan who was alarmed at my shortness of breath while I was doing a radio show, and he packed me off to Rochester where Dr. Rodysill listened to my heart for a few minutes and said, “Mitral valve prolapse,” and brought in a surgeon, Dr. Orszulak, and a few days later they wheeled me into the blue light of the OR and he performed open heart surgery and sewed up the valve. I remember the sense of great competence in that room, no false moves, no joking, nine people who knew exactly what to do next. A person doesn’t encounter this intense competence often in this world. It’s very reassuring to the one who is prone.

So my first stop this week was Cardiovascular where I lay on my left side, bare-chested, for an electrocardiogram, and I looked up and saw the silhouette of a flower fluttering on the screen and asked the technician what it was and she said, “Your mitral valve.” The little flap kept opening and closing, opening and closing, such a delicate piece of tissue, and from the repair of it, I have gained twenty-one years of life that my uncle Bob and uncle Jim didn’t get but died in their late fifties for lack of a surgical procedure developed here in Minnesota.

Cardiology is crucial science in Minnesota, we being German and Scandinavian, hefty consumers of animal fats who seldom turn down dessert, whereas psychiatry is looked on as a step above astrology or witchcraft — we’re puritans and feel that mental illness is caused by a moral flaw. It’s just how we are.

But to lie in dim light and watch my heart beating was a spiritual experience. Twenty-one years, during which I was married to a magnificent woman and we had a loving daughter and I wrote books and saw some of the watery parts of the world and enjoyed humorous friendships, and thanks to the procedure decided to skip alcohol (a depressant), which made me lighthearted — all of this depended on that small flower petal fluttering in my heart.

There’s no need to see into my brain, I live there, but to see the heart, live, on a screen was to see that life is a miracle. The petals of the valve, so delicate. I thought of my friends Leeds and Corinne and Barry and Roger and Annick and Sydney, all died so young, unfulfilled. I feel I should uphold them somehow, live in their behalf.

How shall one live up to this miracle? I believe in self-improvement but only for other people. I do seem to have certain competencies, however, and though I’m no Louis C.K. or Bill Maher, I have the advantage of a strict evangelical background, which is a good foundation for comedy, and I can recite the eighty-seven counties of Minnesota in alphabetical order very rapidly, which is impressive, and there are little theaters here and there where people have been glad to see me, so why not?

A man lay dying, his wife holding his hand, and he said, “Darling, you’ve stuck with me through two heart attacks, a stroke, prostate cancer, the hailstorm that wiped out the beans, the tornado that blew the roof off, and now this brain cancer, and you know something? I’m starting to think you’re bad luck.”

I, on the other hand, lay on my left side in dim light and watched my heart beat, and there’s the difference.

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Forget about nut cases, let’s talk about what’s real

The world is treacherous, my darlings, and if some ambitious person were to interview everyone who ever knew you for ten minutes or more and offered them anonymity, he could paint a bleak picture of you that you wouldn’t recognize. There’s a lot of gossip and envy and animosity out there, don’t kid yourself, so all the more reason to hold fast to your friends. These people are crucial. In high school I wanted to hang out with cool people, but coolness evaporates in your twenties or whenever you beget children, and eventually you come to know who your friends are, they’re people who share a secret language with you.

I have lunch with two old guys I knew when I was a kid and we talk for two hours and Ukraine is never mentioned or former presidents, just recollections and insistent arguments about trivia that would be meaningful to only about four other people on earth, but it’s enormously enjoyable to us.

My boyhood friend Bob and his wife, Marie, and I had dinner last week and thanks to friendly hectoring and teasing, we laughed the whole time except when we had food in our mouths. There is no point in lying unconscious on the floor while a waiter does CPR, it would be unfair to others who are enjoying their meals. And think of the headline: 79-YEAR-OLD MAN CHOKES ON POTATO WHILE GUFFAWING. And the minister conducting the funeral, hearing people whisper, “It was the joke about the penguins on the ice floe.”

Twenty years ago I stood out on Madison Avenue at 2:30 a.m. with George Plimpton, hailing a cab, and he said, “Friendship is what it’s all about. It what it’s always been about.” He’d been drinking Scotch, I was sober, and we were only distant acquaintances, I was a fan of his books, but it had been a wonderful party and it was a fall night and the city felt golden.

George went to Harvard, his dad was an attorney and diplomat, his ancestors came over on the Mayflower; I went to the University of Minnesota, my dad was a railway mail clerk, my people came out of the slums of Glasgow and the woods of Canada. So there was a gap between the two of us. But at that moment, 2:30 a.m., we felt a beautiful bond.

George had a gift for friendship. So did his friend the poet Donald Hall, whom I met later. Writers you admire seem so formidable upon first meeting but Maxine Kumin sat and talked about her farm and her horses and W.S. Merwin showed me his palm tree forest on Maui and Jim Harrison talked about his cabin in the Upper Peninsula and the first time I met David Sedaris it was like we’d known each other for years.

It’s a gift of bestowal, and I don’t have it, being the spawn of evangelical separatists but now and then I overcome this upbringing and bestow generosity of spirit. I call up friends and I don’t say, “Hello, how are you?” I launch right in and we gab for twenty minutes in our own private language. These people are irreplaceable as I well know, thinking about Arvonne, Corinne, Sydney, Bill, Irv, all departed.

Irv Letofsky was my hero when I was 20 and I dropped out of college to write for the St. Paul paper where he was a star reporter. I wrote obituaries; he wrote politics. We had lunch sometimes. He also wrote for a satire revue, The Brave New Workshop, and I showed him some of my fiction and he thought it was good. Then I went back to school and he disappeared out west. I ran into him twenty years later at the Los Angeles Times when I was on tour for a book of mine and the editors threw a luncheon for me and there was Irv, with the same dazzling smile, an editor himself, and he leaned over and said, “I knew you when you were just white trash. That’s great that the publisher invited you to lunch but don’t crap in your pants.” It was a Fargo guy’s way of making me feel at home.

Once friends, forever friends: it’s a fact. True friendship goes on and on, it doesn’t fade, and one day, years later, you make contact again and we’re talking about the softball game where Uncle Don hit the line drive down the third baseline and I backhanded it on one bounce and threw him out at first. Jim remembers it and so do I. I’m an old has-been now but I could’ve been a contender. He knows it and so do I, and two is enough.

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So this guy in New York walks into a grocery store

There is so much plasticity and pretense in the world today that when I come across the authentic such as a little kid bawling because his sister kicked him, it restores my interest in life. He isn’t trying to sell me something or even raise money for a good cause, it’s true feeling. His sense of injustice is real. I think he should hit her, which might spare his having to go through expensive therapy in years to come, but he does not. Perhaps he’ll be a stand-up comic instead.

I find authenticity in church, in the prayers, in the psalm, and last Sunday we sang “How Great Thou Art” and it was so joyful it reduced me to rubble. We sang all four verses and the chorus built each time around and the third and fourth choruses were so euphoric, they would’ve melted a stone-cold atheist and my bass voice got shaky, hearing those sopranos soaring. People held their arms in the air, we were freed from our Episcopalian decorum into realms of pure joy, I get teared up now writing about it.

On my way home I went into Trader Joe’s and when the cashier said, “How are you today, my dear?” I was moved. New York women in their twenties do not address a male stranger as “my dear,” and okay, maybe she was trying to sell me on coming back to Trader Joe’s, but it sounded genuine to me and after I paid, she said, “Thank you, my dear.” I stifled the impulse to pat her shoulder — there still are boundaries, after all — but her lightness, coming on the heels of the hymn, touched me.

I’m descended from Scots-English men who avoided strong feelings and so I don’t weep at funerals or movies or reading about suffering and am grateful for the chance to do it in church. My dad and uncles came and sat by the bedside of their dying mother and were so uncomfortable about grief, they went out in the hall and talked about cars and carpentry. I was a solemn young man, which made me appear more intelligent than I was, so I skated through college without learning much of anything. I still look rather somber. Panhandlers avoid me, nobody asks me for directions, and so my wife’s affection touches me. She sits on my lap every morning, an arm around me, her head against mine, and after thirty years it’s more affecting than ever. She says, “Don’t talk to me, I just woke up,” and sits on my lap and there’s no need to say anything. If I saw this in a movie, a slender woman in pajamas sitting on a man’s lap, her head against his, I’d bust out crying.

She is a hugger and she does it in a beautiful spontaneous way. I sometimes go so far as to pat someone’s shoulder but she raises both arms and the embracee steps forward and accepts it. I feel like embracing people but haven’t learned the choreography. I know many small children who’ve suddenly become middle-aged, and I want to put my arms around them because I fear for the country they are inheriting. We’ve lost the presumption of innocence, which is the basis of civility, the assumption that others mean well and want to do the right thing, unless they prove otherwise. MeToo was a vigilante movement on the left in which a single anonymous accusation could destroy a long career, and it was followed by anti-cop hysteria and suspicion of America itself, while on the right you saw anger against public schools, journalists, public health, gays, and the idea of representative democracy.

I can’t drive anymore because I see two white stripes down the middle where there is only one and rather than wipe out a nice family in an approaching car, I live in Manhattan where owning a car is about as practical as owning a llama. The neighborhood is mostly Jewish so there are old union stalwarts around and lots of shrinks and social workers but also Orthodox who won’t ride an elevator on the Sabbath. We’re Democrats but we’re as conservative as we can be. We love the streets with the little shops and if anyone tried to put in a Walmart, we’d fight to the death, or if a developer tried to tear down a row of brownstones to put up a 20-story condo tower. We’re predominantly hetero but we don’t persecute gays because it’s wrong plus which doing so would kill the arts. And there were several male couples singing “How Great Thou Art” and what about the cashier who spoke endearingly to me? I’m guessing she’s gay. Which makes the “my dear” all the more wonderful. So thank you, sweetheart.

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Just one more morning of an old man

I’m confused about the Federalist Society and who originated originalism and the fact that the Founding Fathers were deaf and needed signers to work out the Constitution, women standing in the front of those bewigged guys and waggling their hands (“We the people of the United States”) and getting some words wrong (“in order to form a more perfect Onion”) and in all this waving of bare arms (which they referred to as the “exercise” of free speech) the bare arms got confused with rifles, and I’m sorry but it strikes me as backwardness, the Founders having had no conception of cordless phones or the germ theory of disease or credit cards — they didn’t even know about baseball. James Madison didn’t know a curve from a slider.

And now after brief spring training, the season begins. I plan to camp in the right field bleachers where you can appreciate the heroic ranginess of the outfielders, their instant calculations of the trajectory of a fly ball, the dash, the leap, the miraculous catch, a beautiful piece of geometry in action. There may be three or four of those plays in a game and they’re worth the time spent waiting, and meanwhile I have a notebook with me, I being a writer, and as you near 80, there’s no time to waste.

I prefer simplicity that saves time. I despise French cuffs, the search for cufflinks, the folding of the cuff, the complex insertion of the link in four holes; I prefer a black T-shirt and jeans. So I have turned down lifetime achievement awards because they involve tuxedos and cufflinks and studs and sitting at a dais and listening to speeches. They tried to put me in the Broadcasting Hall of Fame, they offered me the Mark Twain Award, but it involved cufflinks so I said no.

Prizes have taken over literature and the arts and anyone who wins a big prize is forever stuck with the label — “the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist,” the “Grammy Award-winning songwriter,” as if the decision of five geeks on a committee is the defining moment of your career. The top literary prize is the Nobel, awarded by Swedes, which eliminates any hint of comedy, and so the prize goes every year to morbid writers who create the sort of moribund stuff you should get out of your system by the age of 25.

No, recognition and prizes are a bucket of sheep manure and what counts is the fact that you sit down to your work with enthusiasm even after all these years. Dancers starve themselves, guitarists get carpal tunnel syndrome, actors get old and the roles get smaller and smaller, painters inhale toxic fumes, but we writers are unstoppable. Especially in English.

What a fabulous language. “Don’t cut the branch you’re standing on.” In English, it’s light, somewhat ironic. (Duh.) In German (“Schneiden Sie nicht den Ast, auf dem Sie stehen.”) it’s got a sword and a helmet and leather underwear. And how about “There is a great deal of human nature in everybody.” It says it all.

I began my so-called career when I was 14, writing sports for the Anoka Herald, sitting at an Underwood in the front window of the office of the editor Warren Feist, looking across the street at the Anoka Dairy, trying to make the high school football and basketball teams as heroic as losers can be. I couldn’t play football due to a heart valve problem so I wrote about it but I looked across the street at classmates enjoying ice cream cones, boys talking to girls, some boys clinging to a girl, the swirl of social life all very interesting to me, a fundamentalist kid warned against worldliness, and that’s what I wanted to write about. Football was terribly moralistic, good vs. evil, and the Dairy scene was sensuous, the hand-holding, the arm around the waist, the head against the shoulder.

And now, a lifetime later, this woman leans against me as I write and asks what I’m doing and I read her the first paragraph about the signers and she laughs. How simple life is. If I were a tenor, would she ask me to sing “La donna é mobile”? I very much doubt it. And now she is pulling me upright and leading me off somewhere. I know it’s an odd way to end a column but that’s life. It was never a bad day that had a good evening.

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What comes from pouring coffee for a stranger

It is Lent, when we contemplate God’s great goodness to us and our own unworthiness. The Republicans contemplate the unworthiness of the Democrats, and we contemplate theirs. I have plenty of my own unworthiness to consider but when my wife puts her arms around me I think I must not be all bad. The other day she looked at me and said, “Your hair is trying to do something it really shouldn’t try to do” and that’s about as harsh as she gets.

I had a penitential meal at a motel last week, a complimentary breakfast of synthetic scrambled egg and pseudo-sausage with factory pastries wrapped individually in plastic next to the plastic forks and knives. Breakfast in prison is surely an improvement, especially on death row. I glopped some on a paper plate and imagined a little café where the food is meaningful and a waitress would ask where I’m from, but oh well. As my mother would say, if a lousy breakfast is the most you have to complain about, consider yourself fortunate. And I do.

The night before the breakfast, I did a show for a crowd that wanted to laugh hard and I didn’t get in their way and the next day I flew home to my wife whom I still find fascinating and the descent was like a wild ride on a rocky road and in and out of a couple ditches and when I got home and put my arms around her, I felt uplifted and redeemed. A rough landing will do that for you. A person should experience more of them.

At that dreadful breakfast, I met a man who came up as I was pouring myself a cup of coffee so I poured him one. He was a soybean farmer who also raised sheep and we talked about that for a minute. Parenting is brief, he said, the lambs are weaned at two months and the rams have no parenting responsibility whatsoever, it’s just hit and run, and by thirteen months, the ewes are ready for breeding. He said that soybean farming is looking somewhat hopeful although a couple years ago he lost his whole crop to a hailstorm and almost had to sell the farm.

“So what is the fun in farming?” I said.

“Being outdoors on a beautiful day,” he said. “Knowing other people are shut up in offices and you’re on a tractor and it’s 75 and sunny and you can smell the vegetation and hear the sheep talking.”

“In other words, just being alive,” I said.

“That’s exactly right.”

It was worth the penitential breakfast to get that word from a stranger. I don’t know what his politics are, we didn’t get into that, but this simple conversation brightened my whole day, and it all came from my offering to pour his coffee. Wow. I’d done my job the night before and entertained people and relieved them from the March doldrums by telling jokes but I didn’t get to know any of them except for a lady named Dorothy who came up afterward and said, “You need a haircut.” She, it turned out, is 94 and has all her marbles and some arthritis in her knees but that doesn’t keep her from telling the truth.

Speaking of jokes, there is a wonderful joke in Luke’s Gospel, chapter 24, and it’s so good that John repeats it in his. Jesus was welcomed to Jerusalem as a hero and days later he was crucified and three days later his disheartened followers went to his tomb and found it empty, evidently the grave had been robbed, and they were devastated. Two followers were on the road to Emmaus and talking about the crucifixion and were joined by Jesus who disguised himself and said, “What are you talking about?” They told him. “What crucifixion? Who was it? Anybody I know?” he said.

We should celebrate this joke on Easter morning. Someone walks up the aisle before Communion and says, “What’s everybody all dressed up for? Who brought the flowers? Am I interrupting anything?”

I’ll be there. The church packed with people, many of them in colorful outfits and me in my brown suit, and Brother John, our organist, will include hymns that everyone knows and the room is full of singing and the man in the brown suit weeps, the performer gets to be in the crowd, it’s beautiful. The soybean farmer turns off the tractor and smells the life around him and hears the sheep and is grateful.

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Calm down, people, it’s going to be okay

To a Minnesotan, “polarization” simply means winter and it happens every year around Thanksgiving: you praise the Almighty for His bounty and in the morning the temperature drops thirty-five degrees and the water heater quits and the fuel oil bill arrives and your winter coat, thanks to the bounty, is two sizes too small. The current usage of “polarization” is way off the mark: we are one people and we are skeptical of raging idealism and wary of aggressive authority — in other words, conservative — and we come to the aid of the helpless and accept a high degree of personal liberty — in other words, liberal. Something like the Russian invasion of Ukraine unites us, tanks attacking apartment buildings: the reality of pure evil clarifies our own situation. Our problem isn’t polarization, it’s Twittification, which is undue attention paid to twits and the inherent decency of the vast majority who patiently listen to shouters and bemoaners and handwringers and weigh what they say even if it’s unintelligible.

Calm down, people. So Ginni Thomas urged the White House to dispose of the 2020 election. Her perfect right. She did not, however, personally go to the Capitol on January 6 and bust down doors and go in and attempt to hang Mike Pence. Give the woman credit. Give No. 45 credit. He could’ve marched on the Capitol, leading a convoy of tanks, and seized the electoral ballot boxes and declared himself president for life, and if this had come up before the Supreme Court, would Justice Thomas have recused himself and would the Court have struck down the lifetime appointment and if they did, how many tanks do they command to enforce the decision? No, it was only a show. No, 45 sat in the White House and watched it on TV and two weeks later he went back to Mar-a-Lago.

I once was an alarmist myself and wrung my hands daily and succeeded in becoming miserable, which in Minnesota is an excellent way of making others miserable, so I considered getting a therapist, but then sanity struck: the idea of sitting in a small room with venetian blinds and degree certificates on the walls and telling a young woman with close-cropped hair that my father hadn’t hugged me when I was a boy struck me as a waste of a perfectly good hour so I didn’t.

There are millions of mentally ill in America who desperately need care but it’s hard work and few wish to deal with this. State mental health hospital systems were mostly demolished years ago, because conditions in some were horrendous, and so “deinstitutionalization” took place and now the mentally ill languish in small facilities, some even more horrendous but not so noticeable, and others wander the streets homeless, and a great many wind up in prison. For a country that imagines itself to be Christian, this is bizarre. Jesus wept for the leper, the demon-possessed, the sick and helpless, and in this country we put them where we don’t have to look at them. When I fly into LaGuardia, the plane descends over one of the worst hellholes in America, Rikers Island. New York state finds itself with an enormous budget surplus. Democrats run the state and the city, and will they fix this horror that is staring them in the face? Don’t count on it.

The Christian faith sets high standards, some of which must be ignored: “Ye cannot be my disciples unless you give up all you possess,” Jesus said, which suggests we’re to be nudists, which is not possible in Minnesota. So nuts to that. I cannot live without my coffee maker and my laptop computer. Google will recover in an instant the line from the psalm, “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies,” and so I’m keeping my table. Google also finds me that great Nichols & May sketch in which he kisses her passionately and while locked in the kiss she opens the corner of her mouth and exhales cigarette smoke. It’s on YouTube.

I don’t put her exhalation up with “preparest a table,” but comedy is a gift, and it’s perishable, like kale, but the computer preserves some of it fresh as can be, and for the pleasure of seeing that kiss and the woman exhaling, I guess I have to accept the twitticization and of course I have to love my enemies and I plan to take on that project as soon as Rikers Island is cleared. Keep me informed as to any progress.

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One day last week: the best and worst clearly visible

A dear friend came visiting last week with her three-year-old daughter and it was fascinating to see motherhood up close, having never been one myself. It is a conjoined relationship, a grown-up woman taking leave of the adult world to eat, sleep, talk, walk, with a tiny hand clasping her leg. I was an absentee father, ambitious to pursue my own purposes and as a result, when my daughter calls, her first question is, “Where is my mom?” She loves me but she doesn’t count on me. I watch my friend mothering her three-year-old and I admire this, as I would admire someone levitate in midair.

My friend had no time to watch Judge Jackson’s Senate confirmation hearings, but I watched, and the question that never got asked was, “How did you ever pursue this remarkable legal career while raising two daughters?” She sat with great poise and calmly listened to Republican senators who wanted to toss the terms “child pornography” and “sex offender” as many times as humanly possible — senators who are lawyers themselves and know perfectly well the sleazeball game they were playing.

When her parents were born, segregation was lawful in America, and here was a Black woman of unquestioned qualifications nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, and against that heroic background, Senators Cruz, Cotton, Hawley, Graham, and Cornyn performed shameless acts in broad daylight before millions of people. These men should not be allowed to eat in public restaurants. They should go to the drive-up window and eat in the parking lot.

I’m an old man now and my ambition is all burned away and I lead a rather small life in New York City far from my home in Minnesota, because my wife loves walking in the city, going to theater, concerts, art museums, and she can get on the subway and see America. In Minnesota, people prefer automobiles. I owe her this for having raised our girl. It’s just as simple as that.

Minnesota is the land of slow talkers and so when I sit down to dinner with New Yorkers, I think of intelligent things to say about two minutes too late, and I sit quietly, hands folded, and probably get a reputation as a dimwit, but it doesn’t matter. This is one good reason for getting old. You are ignored and it’s perfectly okay. My goal is to avoid receiving a lifetime achievement award, a symbolic death sentence, and to stay in the game, thank you very much. Thanks to personal cowardice, I skipped contact sports and so I don’t have lower back problems, plus which my wife feels tenderly toward me, and spring is here and I am grateful for independence from a job, a schedule, an organization chart, meetings chaired by a pretentious numbskull talking about incentivization. Instead I sit in the sun and write a limerick:

In August I’m turning fourscore
And before I go out the door
As a non sequitur,
One more dance with her
And I’ll mix us a nice metaphor.

I sit at the table, reading about war in Europe, glaciers melting, a tornado in New Orleans, and playground bullies in the U.S. Senate trying to torment someone and get her to take a swing at them, and back in Minneapolis teachers are on strike for increased wages and smaller class sizes and the state looks at a $7.7 billion budget surplus and the kids sit home and what is a working mother to do? I put the paper down and I listen to a Chopin étude and this piano piece restores some sense to the world. I listen to it and recall my own recent encounters with competence and compassion, the dental hygienist, the kindness of the ophthalmologist’s assistant on the phone, the woman on Columbus Avenue who told me my shoelace was untied, and my friend and her child walk into the room, the tiny hand clasping the mother’s pantleg, and sanity is restored.

This is where we absorbed whatever kindness and decency we possess, holding onto our mother as she goes about. Apparently you don’t learn it in law school. Probably by the time you go off to the first grade, you have some manners or you’re a kicker and biter and need reconstructive training. I’m sorry if the senators’ mothers were hardened streetwalkers or burlesque dancers in carnival tent shows, but why avenge yourself on a woman whose devotion to the law makes you look small? To put it bluntly, you are not a credit to your race or gender and I personally resent it. That is all. Class dismissed.

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I am alone: please let me tell you about it

I am alone in New York this week, and I have double vision so when I walk down the street, I pass identical twins who often are leading identical dogs and my loneliness feels rather dramatic. Double vision cost me my driver’s license and as a pedestrian I’m moved by the world around me, by the kids playing in the park, squealing and chattering, inheriting this grim world of bad actors and rampant horror. I had a good long life and I’m not sure they’ll have the same opportunities showered on me. This makes me terribly sad.

I once was a hardheaded realist, and now I’m a puddle of tapioca pudding. Partly this is due to being alone for a week. Every happily married man should experience loneliness on a regular basis so he can gauge his own happiness. Loneliness has advantages: you can leave your cereal bowl in the sink for days and nobody says, “Why can’t you put this into the dishwasher?” but on the other hand nobody comes and sits on your lap and says, “I love you. You are precious to me.” Women don’t walk up to you on the street and say that.

They used to back when I read poetry on the radio, read love poems in an intimate mellifluous voice, and sometimes a woman would hear my voice in the grocery store asking where I could find the prune juice and she’d whisper, “I loved the Cummings poem you read this morning” so I’d say it to her, “Since feeling is first, who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you,” and even though she was a copy editor and syntax was her business, she put her hand on my shoulder and sighed, but that was when I lived in St. Paul. New York women don’t do that sort of thing.

New York women will speak to a stranger if his shoelace is dragging on the ground or if he asks for directions, but I’ve never been so desperate for a female voice that I’d do that. I have numerous voice-mail messages from my beloved on my phone in which she describes the wonderful time she is having in Minneapolis or Florida or Connecticut without me, and I can sit on a park bench and listen to a few and they bring back memories of our sweet simple life together.

I listen to her the way people used to listen to me when I was a semi-celeb, Mr. Radio Poetry Man, and people, women mainly but a few men, tuned in to hear me say, “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds” or Mary Oliver’s “You do not have to be good. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” Or “I love thee to the level of every day’s most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.”

My ambition was to be a great writer myself, and in pursuit of that I locked myself into small rooms and wrote and rewrote and rerewrote for years and thanks to this ambition I missed out on love, and now I have a shelf full of my books that I never look at, knowing I’d be pained at having wasted all those years, but I have this wonderful woman and I have friends, and it turns out that my main gift to the world was as an anonymous voice of poetry. Somewhere there is a man, probably an unsuccessful actor, whose voice is heard thousands of times daily on New York subways saying, “Stand back from the closing doors, please,” and saying it with authority but also with genuine concern, and we all hear it and subconsciously take comfort from it. Same with the woman who recorded, “The number you have reached is no longer in service at this time,” thirteen words, hardly poetic and yet in her voice I hear her understanding of my sadness at a connection now lost, perhaps forever, a friend who has disappeared.

Each of us has a small role to play. Mary Oliver wrote, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” I am going about my business, walking in the park, mourning for Ukraine and the children, waiting for my love to return to our kitchen, putting my cereal bowl into the dishwasher without being told.

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The secret of survival is comedy, no kidding

Someone named “Someone” has forwarded me a link to an ad, “How To Lift Sagging Jowls” and of course I’m grateful for their interest in my face, which is a grim face thanks to my evangelical upbringing and which led me to have a long happy career in radio rather than as a Sears Roebuck catalog model, but none of this matters whatsoever in the world we live in, with a mad religious zealot armed with nuclear weapons as glaciers melting and the Amazon forests vanishing and my generation bearing heavy responsibility and here we sit staring helplessly at the news of Ukraine and we have no reassurance to offer our grandchildren, which is an old man’s job, to comfort distressed children, and having none, I believe in comedy even more.

My daughter calls and says, “Make me laugh,” and I do. It’s the best I have to offer. Politics has no leverage at all. Two parties, divided fifty-fifty, one is naïve and inward-looking and the other is demented and owned by a man who’s in politics only so he can monetize it, so the best thing we can do is tell jokes.

So I hang out with funny people, such as my wife. After all these years of marriage, we are still quite fond of each other, especially since neither of us has a contagious disease, which permits occasional physical contact. Humor is a fine reason to marry: sex can be found in books, housekeepers can be hired or you can live in motels, but the ability to make the loved one laugh is what, back when there was Latin, we called a “sine qua non.” Many men are hitched to women with the comic sensibility of a post office clerk in December. Mine is a master of feigned disgust, the raised eyebrow, the double take (“What did you say?”), and her timing — timing is at the heart of comedy — is exquisite. When I hear her say, “Have you put in your eyedrops today?” her timing makes me laugh so hard I weep and so the dry eye syndrome affects me not. If any of my previous wives had said it, it would’ve scorched, but she does it as comedy. And what makes it comedy? The audience. Me. I am now old enough to distinguish comedy from aggression and it’s all comedy.

The truth is that life gets funnier as you get old. This is nothing that gerontologists told us to expect. They warned about distress and decay, but decadence can be highly amusing — look at the Romans, not Paul’s epistle but the actual Romans with togas back when they gave up the virtue of farming for the vice of gluttony and got so rotund that the armor they carried weighed more than they did and they sank to the ground, but it was fun right up to when they were punctured by the Vikings who let the gas out of them, pffffffffffffffft, and it was goodbye Ovid and hello Ole. This is history, you should look it up sometime.

Sometimes, when she rises in the morning, my wife looks forlorn and I am tempted to say something of a humorous nature such as the one about the two penguins on the ice floe, one of whom says, “You look like you’re wearing a tuxedo,” and the other says, “What makes you think I’m not?” which is a favorite of mine but she doesn’t understand although I’ve gone to great lengths to explain it, but something tells me to avoid humor in the early morning. I also restrain myself when my beloved prepares healthy and nutritious meals made from carrots and chickpeas and other things that grow on plants, without anything that trots around on little legs. I take a bite and swallow and keep it down and say, “Wow. This is different.” “Different from what?” she says. “Roasted pig butts?” And then I hear a delicate sound, like a mouse clearing its throat, and I smell natural gas, very natural, and we each think, “Was that you or was that me?” and we collapse in chortles. I know it sounds silly, and it is, and at my age and with the world falling apart, immaturity is a great asset. I recommend it to you but don’t take my wife, she is my sanity. She has the answers to questions I haven’t thought of yet.

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Sitting scared in church, thinking about evil

In church Sunday we stood and sang, asking God to bring to this world of strife His sovereign word of peace that war may haunt the world no more and desolation cease, and what in God’s name we meant by this, I can’t tell you, it’s like waving your hand at the incoming lightning and saying, “Rain, rain, go away,” a children’s rhyme, but in church we acknowledge we are children, we’re not Unitarians, just ordinary Episcopalians. America has been so fascinated with our own circus, we didn’t fully appreciate true evil and now here’s Putin taking his place with Lenin and Stalin, this small grim man who shells hospitals and apartment buildings, driving three million refugees out of Ukraine. The only decent thing about him is that he doesn’t appear in public with his daughters or his girlfriend, he spares them the shame.

Our former president must regret the photograph in which he and Putin lean toward each other, holding hands, and affection shines in the Russian’s eyes, a moment of bonding. Trump is uncomfortable around dogs and children, odd for a politician, and I can’t recall him with his arm around his youngest boy or his grandkids, or petting a dog or holding a cat; he once claimed to enjoy grabbing women but you never see him with his arm around his wife, but he shows real warmth toward Vlad and it’s not to his political benefit, holding hands with a man capable of bombing a maternity hospital.

I worry about my country. I wish my fellow Democrats were not so abysmally naïve about the world as so many of us are. I wish the country were united behind our founding principles, but I don’t know that we are. I have a feeling that if Putin launched missiles that wiped out the blue states, Fox America would be happy to cut a deal with him.

We prayed in church for all nations to be guided in ways of peace and for the right use of natural resources and for all whose lives are linked with ours, including refugees, something I’ve never been, just a mortgagee for a house that was my refuge, but I never left it in a rush not knowing where I’d wind up. I did know Julius and Fannie Schindler, parents of my friend Milton, who fled a Yiddish-speaking shtetl to escape Hitler for the safety of north Minneapolis where their boy soprano sang the prayers at Mikro Kodesh synagogue and made old ladies weep. The Schindlers raised him to be American and he loved baseball and the blues and I knew him as Soupy Schindler, singing and playing euphoric harmonica in a band called the Sorry Muthas. Had the shtetl not been torn to pieces, he might’ve become a good tailor, but instead he was a glorious blues singer and when he sang, “Stealin’, stealin’ — pretty mama don’t you tell on me, I’m stealin’ back to my same old used to be,” it stayed with me.

Hitler and Putin believe they can crush the human spirit, America believes spirit can find the freedom to triumph, and Soupy was the proof of it, and so were other refugees who’ve come here.

But our nation is divided as it was not in 1940. I wish Joe Biden will show mercy to individuals who got caught up in the January 6 riot and without attacking officers simply got carried away and wound up in the wrong place. They went at the behest of their president to stop the electoral count and they failed at that and I think most should be forgiven. Our nation is on the verge of a precipice. Mr. Trump should be pardoned as well. The man acted on pure impulse for four years, never a plan, and his intent can never be proved beyond a doubt. He did what made him feel good. Let him go. We need to save our country.

I got a letter from an ex-Marine who did two hitches in Vietnam and feels he was badly affected by Agent Orange. He supports Trump, believes the 2020 election was stolen, thinks a ruling class runs the country, that we haven’t had consensual government for many years, if ever. This is heartbreaking, a Marine who feels he was a pawn of a regime like Russia’s. We have work to do. Let’s pardon the man and get back to the future. For the sake of the children, let’s be wise.

 

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