Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 38

Nobody asked, but I’ll tell you anyway

I come from Minnesota, the modest K-shaped state with the bump on top, sitting on the front line of defense against Canada, predominantly white Protestant but trying not to be too obvious about it, maybe grow a beard and eat oysters on the half shell and read poetry to raise questions in people’s minds. Sometimes we’re called the North Star State, sometimes the Gopher State, but really we’re the Recovery State, where Hazelden was born and various programs for curing chem-dep and other addictions. AA is big. There are thousands of big rooms full of folding chairs where people hear accusatory talks and then break up into discussion groups.

Bob Dylan was from here but he loved Woody Guthrie, the itinerant life, the train whistle in the night, surrealist poetry, none of which are popular here, and we have no idea where he is now. Some say he has a big farm near Moose Lake but who cares? Prince was a greater musician but came to a tragic end, there being no good recovery program for addicts so rich and famous. Fitzgerald is our one great writer in the American Pantheon and he was good but no Hemingway.

We are a producer of losing presidential candidates, McCarthy and Humphrey in 1968, Mondale in 1984, and Harold Stassen who unsuccessfully sought the presidency nine times, surely an all-time record. When you are Right and you know it, there is no shame in losing, quite the contrary, and Minnesota is tied with Utah and Vermont as Most Righteous State. Two years ago, when George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis cop, thousands of righteous Minnesotans rioted for days. Cops had killed Black men before but this death was caught on video on a cellphone so it was harder to ignore and thousands of outraged whites went out and burned down their neighborhoods and young Democrats came up with the line “Defund the police,” which will be a millstone around the necks of liberal politicians for years to come and assist a right-wing minority in maintaining power.

Minnesota has had its visionaries, like the Mayo brothers who created a medical clinic organized like a farmers’ co-op, but the Scandinavian Lutheran culture of Good Enough did not encourage breakthrough advances. What do you need a laptop computer for, darling — you already have an Underwood typewriter. And we have a phone in the kitchen — why do you need to carry one in your pocket?

And so we have a serious shortage of billionaires. There’s some old flour and grain money around, a lumber baron or two, and Scotch tape is still selling well, but we lack the oligarchs who might donate a couple billion to the U of M for a Climate Institute or establish a first-class psychiatric hospital. So we make do. It could be worse, as we say. We lie dying and you ask how we feel and we say, “I’ve felt better.” No big deal.

Minnesota is my home forever. The Keillors came in 1880 and spawned me in 1942, a squinty country kid riding his bike to the downtown library, skipping his swim lesson at the YMCA to sit and read books and then lying to my mother that I was learning to float. I’ll never be a New Yorker but I live there because it gives me the same wonderment I felt riding my bike up Hennepin Avenue in 1955. I take the B train to the public library and sit among young Asian college kids, none of whom know me from a bale of hay, and in their midst I feel young and ambitious again. I sit down with a page of writing and feel it might turn into something sort of marvelous.

Awards mean everything in the writing biz and if you win a big one, Pulitzer or National Book, you’ll wear it on your sleeve forever after, it will precede your name in every review, but I’m a Midwesterner, suspicious of medals and titles. I only care what my readers think. I only want to be known by my own. When I do readings, I decline an introduction, I just go out and talk and try to make sense.

When I die, my ashes will come back to the little cemetery north of Anoka, where the other Keillors are, and if a kid walks into the Anoka Library and asks for a book of mine, I hope the librarian gives him Boom Town. It’s my best book and I wrote it this year. And now I’m working on two others, but who knows? All I know is that a writer is someone who writes. So off I go. Catch you later.

 

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Driving across Indiana today

I come from low-key Minnesotans who like to end a sentence with then or now — “So what are you up to then?” — which is intended to soften the question and avoid an accusatory tone and if you said, “Oh, just waiting to see what turns up,” they might say, “Sounds good then,” so when I heard that the Supremes plan to toss out Justice Harry Blackmun’s decision in Roe v. Wade, I thought, “So what kind of a deal is that then, for crying out loud,” which is my people’s idea of profanity but doesn’t call down fire and brimstone then.

He was a low-key Minnesota Republican who grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood of St. Paul and got scholarshipped to Harvard and returned to Minnesota to be resident counsel at the Mayo Clinic, and the heart of Roe v. Wade is the reluctance to interfere in a woman’s intimate life and dictate the answer to an agonizing question, which reflects a Midwestern temperament. We would interfere with a big kid bullying a little kid, or a child torturing an animal, or some other act of cruelty we witness, but the Mississippi law the Supremes are prepared to uphold is a radical invasion by the state of a woman’s life. That’s what sort of deal it is.

The Supremes at the heart of the majority are only fulfilling the purpose for which they were nominated by Mr. Trump, so the shock and alarm registered in the press is a little surprising. This is a dog bite that could’ve been foreseen long ago. And perhaps the court is prepared to do battle along other fronts in the culture wars that the rest of us are a little weary of. Maybe there’ll be dicta on gender, sexuality, the right of parents to censor schools, the right of politicians to not be contradicted, the right of Supreme Court nominees to misrepresent their views to the U.S. Senate.

Hundreds of acres of printed pages will be written about all of this but driving today across Indiana to the elegant town of Wabash, I feel that the country isn’t changed much by the Kulturkampf. This is a handsome town of ten thousand on the Wabash River and the visitor sees immediately that historic preservation is a spiritual value here. There’s an 1880 Presbyterian church, a 1920 J.C. Penney’s, an 1865 Disciples of Christ, a magnificent 1878 county courthouse with a bell tower that dominates. Perhaps some county commissioners have imagined replacing it with a Costco-style courthouse but they haven’t succeeded. There are two historic districts, one residential, one downtown, where students of architecture can walk by examples of classical architecture, where you could shoot a movie set in 1940. I’m staying in a 1906 hotel across from the Eagles Theatre of the same era. Clearly, generations of Wabashites have loved this town. My hometown destroyed all its most beautiful buildings and became dismal and decrepit. Wabash is pretty fabulous.

Maybe a huge mall will be built outside town but it’s hard to imagine Wabash giving up magnificence for modular. I walk around this town and sense my own conservatism. This is a town where people keep their houses nice and go next door to visit. These are my people. Tonight when I perform at the Eagles Theatre, I’ll ask the audience to sing “America” and they’ll know the words and sing it in harmony, and also “It Is Well With My Soul” and “I Saw Her Standing There.” I could live here happily.

My grandpa Denham left Glasgow in 1905 with his wife, Marian, and kiddies and moved to south Minneapolis and never looked back. His stepmother disapproved of him because Marian was pregnant when Grandpa married her. Mormons fled Illinois for Utah to escape persecution. Trans people may leave Kansas for New York or San Francisco to find people more like themselves. I live in New York because I love anonymity. If I lived here in Wabash, among my own people whom I love, I’d feel people staring at me, thinking, “Divorced. Twice. Left the Brethren. Used to drink a lot. And he wrote that stupid column about Roe v. Wade.” I walk around in New York, unself-conscious, enjoying odd accents, Asian faces, Orthodox schoolboys, confused tourists. Plenty of people will leave Mississippi and Texas to be free of the authoritarianism. The Alito court can have Mississippi and Texas and it can ban same-sex marriage and require teachers to teach from pre-1950 textbooks, but New York will still be New York, I’ll enjoy my anonymity, and when, as happened recently, a woman cashier says, “How are you, my dear?” it will touch my heart.

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Kindness: you look and you’ll see it.

I’ve been a rhymer ever since I was twelve and read the limerick about the young girl of Madras who had a remarkable ass and so when I read about a trans legislator in Kansas, it started my engine, but she turns out to be a nice woman named Stephanie Byers (choirs, lyres) who is only advocating kindness for her kind, no big deal in my book, and I looked up the girl from Madras. It’s one of the only limericks that accuses the reader of unseemly thoughts — her ass is “not soft, round, and pink as you probably think, but the kind with long ears that eats grass,” and I loved this as a kid, having grown up evangelical and knowing something about righteous fever.

I’ve gone through my own fevers back in my youth, I marched, I manifestoed, and I am still capable of high dudgeon, but I’ve come to have a higher regard for kindness than righteousness, especially the sort that burns other people at the stake, which we see more of these days.

My ancestor Elder John Crandall was arrested in Boston in 1651 for preaching kindness toward the Algonquins, which was not politically correct at the time, and a man who was arrested with him was whipped, so John removed to Rhode Island, a more civil society, where young women weren’t burnt as witches on the basis of other women’s accusations.

I was five when our family was split by a schism in the Sanctified Brethren caused by two preachers who loved the Lord but loathed each other. It was more tribal than Bible. Dad’s family was on one side of the schism and Mother’s on the other, and Dad stuck with Mother. What I remember was the kindness and generosity of Dad’s sisters, my loving aunts who never spoke of the split to me ever, not even by implication. I felt lavishly loved by them.

A friend who lives on the 18th floor of a building in L.A. heard some hubbub in the hall and found three cops and his next-door neighbor and her little granddaughter. The neighbor had called the cops because her daughter was on the balcony, threatening suicide. My friend took the little girl into his apartment to play with his three Pekingese, meanwhile a cop tried to talk to the woman on the balcony and she jumped to her death. The friend and his wife have become surrogate stepparents to the little girl who now lives with her grandmother and who seems not to realize what happened to her mother and to be okay with her life. Her future is not clear, which is true for most of us, but she has kind people nearby looking after her. And she likes to dress the Pekingese in dog jackets and party hats and serve them tuna sandwiches around a table.

Years ago, I went to Washington to lobby for the National Endowment for the Arts and every congressman I talked to was very righteous about an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs indirectly subsidized by the NEA, including one of a naked man with a whip stuck up his rear end. The congressmen enjoyed showing me this picture and telling me how horrible it was. Then I visited Senator Simpson, the Senate Republican whip, who was delighted to tell me about a game he’d seen played by drunken cowboys in Wyoming, who dropped their trousers and competed to see who could pick up a quarter off a wooden bench using only his cheeks. I became a fan of Simpson’s in that moment. To make a joke in the face of showboat righteousness is the mark of a great man.

An old friend of mine was blessed with two kind sons who conspired to fly her halfway around the world though the friend dreads flying with her whole heart and she was exhausted from having cared for her ancient mother for years, but she allowed herself to be squired to the airport and one son held her hand all the way to France, then Vietnam, and now, here on my phone, is a video of the flyer holding her other son’s tiny twin daughters, in an apartment in Ho Chi Minh City.

We have a dark history in that land of the damage righteousness can work and I pray that these little girls grow up swaddled in kindness. They look at the flyer with bright curious eyes, scootching, preparing to crawl, and then, Lord knows, do the 100-yard high hurdle. Lord be merciful.

 

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One more word about Twitter, then I’ll shut up

I once knew a librarian who at age 34 fell in love with a poet she met in a bar who, though sober, announced that he adored her. For years she’d only dated men who were looking for a sympathetic sister, but this fellow lusted after her and suddenly she was shopping for a bigger bed and learning to samba. The problem was that his poems were bleak and not ingeniously bleak but dull bleak, disconnected dark images of dread and dismay. He wrote one for her and she said, “It’s nice,” and he said, “I can tell you don’t like it,” and she said, “It’s sort of dark,” and he ran out the door (he was living with her) and she hasn’t heard from him since.

It can be dangerous to tell the truth. Why couldn’t she have said, “I love it, it’s one of your best”? His poems weren’t hurting anybody. Polar bears weren’t dying from them, they weren’t poisoning the rivers. Let the man be a bad poet and eventually he’ll find his way into marketing or lawn mowing or some other gainful employment.

That’s how I feel about COVID. Yes, people suffered, some terribly, but it also had its bright side. Millions escaped their cubicle jungles and got to work at home in their pajamas. We skipped big fundraising dinners and games where unmasked people sing the school fight song, emitting clouds of infected droplets with every “Fight, fight, fight,” and we regained the pleasure of staying home and playing Scrabble with a loved one. Colleges shut down and some kids who would’ve majored in women’s studies and wound up grinding out lattes at Starbucks went online and found out about Bitbond and earned a few million and retired to the Maldives. Some kids who planned to become novelists went into house painting instead and are happier.

We learned how to use the telephone again. Social media is what it is, but on the phone you can enjoy chitchat, banter, palaver, gossip. On Instagram, you just run up a flag, and on the phone you kid each other, tell jokes, banish loneliness, whereas with Twitter you’re just throwing manure at the barn wall. I don’t do FaceTime because I look like Cotton Mather with a migraine, but with audio I can be sort of charming.

While the virus hangs around, we’re all living in the present. Our kids and grandkids own the future and I worry about them. I worry how they will deal with medical insurance without reading the ream of microscopic print that grants the Company (hereinafter known as Beelzebub) the right to the client’s firstborn. I worry about the Supreme Court now that it has six federalists who commute to work on horseback.

I have no right to rag on the Court; I’ve done dumb things that make your mistakes look like inspired genius. When I retired in 2016, I gave away my company to my former employer for free, and a year later the CEO called me on the phone and fired me, no “Thank you” or anything. I said, “Okay.”

I once had a best-selling book and used the profits to open my own bookstore in a basement in St. Paul, expecting long lines of shoppers, but no, Amazon was taking over the world. It’s so easy to buy stuff from Amazon, you can do it in your sleep, and people do. Amazon owns the rights to the Bible. You can’t even use the word “ishkabibble” without paying them. The first hundred bucks in the collection basket at church goes to them because they own the Lord’s Prayer. So my bookstore floated away on red ink and I thought of having my head examined but shrinks don’t deal with dumb, it’s beyond their scope. Bookstore ownership was my dream and when we’re asleep the mind takes its own path. The most righteous are capable of dreams they could not confess to others for fear of excommunication. St. Paul had dreams he didn’t include in his epistles. Solomon did dumb things. Wisdom comes from experience, and experience includes stupidity. Theology is about truth but life is about banana peels.

So it’s good to see the world’s richest man pay $44 billion for Twitter. It’s a good investment, like cornering the market on mosquitoes. Think of the blood you’ll collect every year. The mind boggles as it never boggled before.

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What macaroni and cheese means to me

Men my age are not riding high these days compared to back in the Renaissance or the 19th century so I am taking a back seat and not getting fussed up. I appreciate new stuff like YouTube and the Unsubscribe option and the peanut butter latte, but I don’t know who famous people are anymore — Abe Lincoln, Al Kaline, A.J. Liebling are on my A-list but I wouldn’t know Adele if she walked up and offered me her autograph. I’m out of it. So I keep my mouth shut. I’ve listened to people discussing their loyalty to particular coffees from specific regions of Kenya or Nicaragua and I don’t weigh in on this. I’d be okay with Maxwell House Instant. Coffee is coffee. Debating it is like arguing about doormats. You walk in, you wipe your feet, it’s not a transformative experience. I feel the same way about gender: it’s your beeswax, not mine. Be who you want to be but don’t expect me to call you them or it or us.

I drink coffee because it is a warm liquid and I accept the myth that it enlivens the brain though probably hot water from the tap would serve as well. My coffee habit is a cultural choice: I don’t want to be part of the tea crowd, it’d mean I’d have to have a ponytail and wear linen clothing and have a cockadoodle named Josephine. I drink coffee and have short hair and jeans with a hole in the knee.

My people were evangelicals who argued about Scripture, not coffee, which led to schisms and hard feelings, which gave them a pleasurable sense of righteousness, but I don’t need that. I’m a sinner and fully aware of it. In just two paragraphs I slighted people in search of gender identity and insulted tea drinkers. But each day is a new day and there’s hope for improvement. I get up in the morning and start up the coffeemaker and take my pills and pour Cheerios in my bowl and slice bananas on it.

Cheerios sponsored The Lone Ranger on the radio, and the masked man with the fiery horse with the speed of light and the hearty “Hi-yo, Silver” is a good role model for a writer such as myself. He and his faithful Indian companion didn’t waste time disparaging people for their beverage or gender preferences, they were busy pursuing evildoers across the Western plains.

The beauty of old age is giving up the pursuit of evildoers and simply enjoying lunch, which my faithful companion and I did yesterday at an old beloved café that still has macaroni and cheese on the menu, which brings back memories of eighth grade when M&C was served every Wednesday, from which a boy learned the concept of Good Enough. We were Midwesterners and adequacy was sufficient. It still is. It could be worse.

“Let not your heart be troubled,” Jesus said to Thomas, but the heart isn’t the problem, the brain is. Soon an electrocardiologist will be able to run a wire up a vein in your groin and poke around in the heart and clear out old debris like “Doe, a deer, a female deer, ray, a drop of golden sun” and replace it with the Beatitudes, but meanwhile the brain wakes me up at 2 a.m. with prosecutorial questioning and I lie in the dark, exhausted, and then I reach over and touch my companion’s arm and she says, “What?” which is a question that gets right to the heart of the matter.

What matters is that life is getting better. GPS has made a huge difference and soon we’ll wear a scanner in the brim of our cap and Alexa will say, “Watch out for the curb three steps ahead. The smiling woman approaching you is your upstairs neighbor Melissa. The man with her is not her husband, it’s her therapist. She dumped the husband. The trees ahead are a rare Adirondack tupelo and the birds in them are Hibernian warblers. They navigate by starlight.” You greet Melissa by name and if you desire more information about the trees or birds, you click a clicker and Alexa goes into detail. She’s a great advance over the dashboard lady who says, “Prepare to merge right in 600 feet.”

I want to live long enough to see this. I’m scheduled for a heart procedure soon when a cardioarchivist will go into my heart and remove dozens of regrets about bad career moves and unhappy romances and if my faithful companion asks, “How are you?” I’ll say, “Okay,” and okay is not bad, it’s good enough.

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The country’s problems solved in 800 words

I was in Minnesota for a while in April but weather systems can’t read a calendar and they were delivering more of November, which is satisfying to us Minnesotans. We are great complainers. God made children short so they wouldn’t have far to fall and God put us in Minnesota because joyfulness is absolutely not our thing, Easter is a holiday we dread, the enforced jubilation, the trumpets in the choir loft, and when you wake up Easter morning and a cold rain is falling it’s very very satisfying.

I went to Minnesota alone and it was interesting discover that without my wife, I don’t know where things are or how to get the washer to work when it stops in mid-cycle and won’t resume. I can’t make sense of the instruction manual so I call her back in New York and she tells me to press START and hold it in and I do and the washer resumes. It’s downright embarrassing — my dad did his own auto repair and carpentry and I can’t operate an automatic washer. Thank goodness I still have a sense of shame.

Men are lonely hunters and herdsmen and I turned down dinner invitations because I struggle in social situations. I invited three women friends, strangers to each other, to lunch Saturday and they conversed easily among themselves and I sat at the end of the table, a silent observer. I thought to myself, “Their gender can get along fine without mine, and what will we do when they discover it?”

This was never so clear as in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, watching the hunters Graham, Hawley, Cruz, Cornyn, Cotton, go after Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who sat with calm and patient dignity and said, “Thank you, Senator” to each one and tried to answer their spitballs with reasoned comment. My gender looked stupid and craven on national TV that week and I cannot get that out of my mind, listening to elderly juveniles harass the teacher.

It was enough to make me wonder if men in public office should be required to wear a defibrillator that will shock them when they tell a fib, a little kick in the chest that says, “Shape up or ship out.”

Maybe warfare is the result of sheer stupidity, men needing to find something to do with themselves. The uniforms are wonderful, precision marching is satisfying, but there needs to be a larger purpose and why not go find men in another uniform and shoot them? My Minnesota friends of Viking heritage lead peaceful lives for the most part but in the fall they feel an overwhelming urge to get in a longboat and go burn a village and capture all the women and they satisfy the urge by going to a football game and getting good and drunk and then they’re good again.

The Great War of 1918 was the dumbest war that ever was and it was caused in part by the fact that armies had so much great new stuff they were desperate to use — tanks, planes, armored ships, bigger artillery — and the rulers and prime ministers strove to find an excuse to let them go to it and men marched off to war with bounding enthusiasm and about ten million soldiers died and twelve million civilians in a conflict that accomplished nothing except to lay the groundwork for the War of 1939.

Our institutions are busy pursuing diversity and inclusivity but it’s mostly cosmetic and what we need is detestosteronation of politics. The current Congress is gridlocked and I suggest we give them all a two-year sabbatical and elect a new one — we hope, with a female majority — and take a break from stupidity. Some things need to happen in America. Climate change must be addressed. A system of excellent affordable health care so that people, regardless of race or class, can take advantage of the advances in medical science. Child support and capable public education that guarantees every child a chance in life. Decent care for mentally ill, who now wind up homeless or in prison or in hopeless squalor. And fair taxation to pay for it.

All this can be done in two years if we elect representatives who have the caregiver gene — in other words, women — and then in two years the clown show can return and maybe we can declare war on Canada. Why not? Are you afraid of Canadians? Montreal must fall. Send the dogs to lift a leg on Winnipeg. Use judo on Trudeau. Improve Vancouver with stain remover. Nuts to the North!

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Enough about that, let’s talk about happiness

You come to a point in life when the days of wild uninhibited sex seem to be behind you, either because she is no longer moved by your singing, “Oh my love, my darling, I hunger for your touch,” or the flaming torches on the bedposts seem hazardous and you put the theatrics aside and discover that holding her close and stroking her arm are just as wonderful, perhaps even more so.

Small things can make me so happy. I’ve recently discovered this. I once had a book that was No. 1 on the Times best-seller list and of course I’d love to have another, but meanwhile I made myself tremendously happy the other day by switching from a $110 room in an old run-down hotel to a $170 room in a new hotel. I was feeling low because I’d been away from my sweetie for two weeks and was on the road and the $110 room was small, not big enough to swing a cat, and the shower was tricky and the desk chair wouldn’t raise so I was typing at an unnatural angle and there was no room service so I switched to a hotel two blocks away that was spacious and light and the shower and desk chair worked and a cheerful woman brought me a BLT and coffee, and I felt absolutely wonderful. I believe the word would be “exalted.” Sixty dollars is not too much to pay for exaltation in my book.

When I say that small things make me happy, I’m not talking about sunrises or puppy dogs or the hugs of small children. Sunrises only remind me of a job I had in college as a parking lot attendant, a job that started at 5 a.m. and so I saw many sunrises while dealing with angry parkers who were late for class and didn’t want to follow directions and I learned that highly educated persons can be jerks. Sunrises also remind me of the photographers who’ve shown me pictures they took of a sunrise that they were terribly proud of as if it were the Resurrection. I am not fond of dogs, their affection is random and they don’t belong indoors, they should be out in the yard guarding the chicken coop. As for small children, they don’t cozy up the way I did when I was small and harkened to my elders’ stories. Small children now are bent over a computer screen fascinated by vulgarity and violence, learning things they can use to horrify their parents.

No, I’m talking about my first afternoon in the $170 hotel room when I realized I had lost one of my hearing devices and I conducted an exhaustive search of the floor, my suitcase, my briefcase, the bathroom, the bed where I’d taken a nap, and finally accepted that I had just lost a good deal of money, which cast a shadow on my exaltation, and then my phone rang, it was my daughter, I put the phone to my ear, and I felt the missing hearing aid. It was in my ear.

I realize this makes me look like a dimwit who needs to be put under guardianship, but I don’t care. I was completely re-exalted. I was delighted.

Delight does not come easily to a man approaching 80. I have not been delighted by ballet in a very long time, if ever. I’ve been disappointed by Dostoevsky. I feel no desire to sit through Handel’s Messiah again. I don’t feel renewed by Renoir. I even feel my enthusiasm for college hockey is waning.

But last week, at a large clinic for a physical checkup, I got a chest X-ray — along with a line of other men who stripped to the waist — was marched into the room by a young woman who lined me up facing forward, then turned to the side, and led me out to make room for the next customer. It was an assembly line. I said to her on my way out, “You don’t get to really know people very well in your job, do you.” I went into the dressing room to get dressed and I could hear her repeating my line to the other technicians and they were screaming with laughter. She told it over and over and told it very well. It seemed to make their day. It made mine. To create laughter out of ordinary tedium is a privilege. There’s nothing better.

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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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