Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 39

Which side are you on, if I may ask

The war is far away and then it is up close. I write a parody of Frost’s “Stopping By Woods” in which the man stops to pee and out of nowhere I remember the photograph in the Times of a Ukrainian family trying to escape the Russian advance, hurrying through a small town to catch a train to somewhere, a young boy, girl, mother, a family friend, carrying packs and a dog in a carrier, towing a suitcase, and here they lie freshly dead, murdered by Russian mortars shelling civilians, no military engagement nearby, and the image stays with you, the friend face-up, the boy and girl lying on their sides, and who will tell the father who is probably fighting somewhere, who will bury them, who will commemorate these senseless horrible deaths?

The Minneapolis paper ran a story about the Times’s decision to run the picture but didn’t run the picture, which isn’t gruesome or bloody, but simply terribly real. Four people suddenly killed for no reason except to cause suffering. The Russians have shelled power plants, hospitals, refugees, and war crimes are fundamental to Putin’s policy, and the photograph was the Times’s way to show that. The picture is clear in my mind days later.

I’m at an age where all the people who might’ve reassured me about this war are long dead and so I steady myself. Most of what agitated us a month ago is gone and forgotten, wiped out by the Russian tanks. We’re done talking about gender pronouns and woke tropes and done with the anti-mask b.s. and the Florida Orange, he is less relevant than pink plastic sandals, and what matters are the women and children fleeing for their lives, no idea what lies ahead, just the thought that Ukraine must survive and the civilized world must punish the war criminals.

And then, after some restless nights, you get one whole night of good sleep and awaken in gratitude and make coffee and read that the Senate has unanimously passed a law against lynching as a hate crime. It only applies here, not to the Russians in Ukraine, but the shock of seeing the words “unanimous” and “Senate” in one sentence — what will happen next? Will the American people — some of them? A fraction? Ten percent? — demand that cheap political blather be given a rest for a while and let us form a united front out of love of our country at its best in crisis?

Inflation is a cost of COVID, along with a million dead: we can game this for political advantage, meanwhile the nation faces the challenge of standing up for our fundamental decent democratic values. We’ve fought wars that we inherited from colonialism, but this is different.

The Russian people are in the grip of a madman who sits at the end of a forty-foot table, knowing that he might well wind up hanging from a lamppost one of these days. The difference between his rule and our democracy could not be clearer. Republicans who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent are saying that we’re the same. This lie needs to be set aside for historians to consider, along with the idea that January 6 was a normal political protest. There are urgent questions to take up. Murderous hardware is being brought to bear on a free people and that family lies dead in the town square.

I was looking all over for my phone the other day after it disappeared in plain sight and I bumbled around in a state of confusion — I come from the era when the phone was in the kitchen, at the end of a cord plugged into a wall, and so I’m not used to the free-floating phone, and my Beloved, about whom I’ve written numerous sonnets, saw me and said, “You look lost,” which is a harsh thing to say to an old fundamentalist, it brings back memories of gospel sermons about End Times and the need to repent. This present tribulation in Europe is a powerful message to America about the seriousness of our situation. Our long-running cultural “wars” are an amusement, the MeToo vigilantes, the evangelicals’ deal with the devil, the stolen election, but now the Cold War has resumed for real, and the lines are clearly drawn between Western democracy and authoritarian regimes. They stand prepared to wipe out individual freedom and rewrite history, and it’s time to decide which side you are on.

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Reality is a good antidote, America. Take a long hard look.

“God created war so that Americans would learn geography,” said Mr. Twain, so now you sit in a New York apartment and try to reassemble your memory of Europe, where Germany and Poland are, and text with friends in Prague whose frightened little girls ask, “What is happening?” We don’t know. In one week, we’ve been transported back to 1940, and our Europe of chic vacations and intellectual ferment is now the cauldron of wars that our grandparents fled. My grandpa fled Glasgow, having five children and no wish to see the Great War up close, and my friend Bud Trillin’s people fled Ukraine for the reason Jews have been migrating for centuries. Chic had nothing to do with it, they were quite pleased to become Missourians.

Reality is a shock but it does make things more real. American military strategy goes out the window: how do you strategize against a schizoid dictator with an enormous nuclear arsenal and a compliant elite? Rationalism is only an observation. The stone-faced Putin has invaded an independent nation, firing rockets at a nuclear reactor, women and children in Kyiv weeping as they board a train for Poland, looking at husbands and fathers they may never see again, thanks to the small man at the end of the forty-foot table who says he is conducting an anti-Nazi mission, a naked lie as naked as the belief that COVID is a hoax or Trump won the election.

The hero of the moment is Volodymyr Zelensky, the Jewish comic who is now the guerilla president of Ukraine, and as long as he keeps dancing and making video speeches to his people, Ukraine survives, and when a Russian kill squad finds him, Ukraine becomes a Soviet republic again.

Our country has no Zelensky, alas. Our clown was Trump, who now is exposed as a Putin stooge who tried to kill off NATO to fulfill Putin’s great wish and enable him to reassemble Stalin’s empire. I know a nice man who asks, “Why do you hate Trump?” and who blames it all on Obama and now Biden. There are a hundred million nice people like him. Trump sold a bill of goods to the heartland and I pity that convoy of a thousand truckers in Baltimore, furious at the government about vaccine requirements even as the plague recedes, a protest without a purpose, just pure anger on eighteen wheels.

Putin sits in his palace, holding the power to destroy European civilization, and what did civilization ever do for him? Nothing, obviously. His man Trump recedes into his gilded cave, waiting for the next reel. He has a lot riding on the November election and it may not be helpful for Republicans to be seen supporting Putin while tanks roll through Ukrainian cities and rockets destroy apartment buildings and tiny children in ICUs are wrapped in blankets and moved to safety. This war is in our computers and phones and on TV, if we have eyes and care to look, and it is a reality that makes the Florida Orange and Chinless Mitch and Caribbean Ted Cruz disappear.

I pray for my fellow Democrats to put a damper on their righteous narcissism and rediscover some seriousness about freedom and love of country. Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez said she liked the part of Biden’s speech about Ukraine but I wish she’d come right out and confess that she loves this country. What’s so hard about that? Some dreadful political hacks go around with flag pins on their lapels but that’s no excuse for cynicism. It was abysmally stupid of her to pose for fashion pictures in Vanity Fair but I’ve forgiven her. Time for her to shape up now.

My generation was badly affected by the antiwar movement of the Sixties and the purity of the counterculture of dulcimers and organic granola and we got too good for our own good and lost touch with our people. I am just an old evangelical unable to say obscene words with authority, but I do believe Ukraine can beat the Russian Army. Trump and Putin are from another solar system. One is a madman in Moscow and the other is rearranging his hair. God preserve the heroic comedian. A great deal is riding on this. Joe and I are old men. Who will be our Zelensky?

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I come from the heartland, I live in New York

Now that we know the State of the Union is good and we’re into Lent, one should examine the State of the Soul, I suppose, but all I can think of are the dumb things I’ve done in my life, for which I hold an all-time record, hands down, shoes laced together. That is why I never looked for a shrink: they don’t deal with cluelessness; it is beyond them. I come from a family of capable people but I’ve ingested the wrong animal fats or maybe my pillow is too hard. I don’t know. Literally, I don’t.

I remember soul-searching when I was a boy, sitting under ferocious preaching in our evangelical church (we called it a Meeting to distinguish ourselves from the Papists), and the sermons were about imminent death and I imagined dying in a car crash, bomb explosion, sinking ship, and being ushered into Eternity and I wanted to accept Jesus as my Savior, but I felt it should be a tumultuous emotional moment with weeping in a prostrate heap, and not simply checking the “Yes” box, and I didn’t know how to make myself sincerely tumultuous so I doubted my own salvation. Now I’m old and never think about death and feel gratitude for God’s grace though I don’t claim to understand it. My weeping is due to nostalgia at old hymns such as “Standing On The Promises,” which we Episcopalians don’t sing but we sing songs that remind me of it.

I live in New York as an accommodation of my wife who likes it here, and I recently came across a gospel preacher in Times Square, a Black man holding a big Bible the size of a bread loaf with a voice like a bass trombone and I appreciated his dedication to his lonely calling. And then I attended to my calling, which was to sit in a big reading room of the public library and write, surrounded by students at laptops, many of whom I guess are children of immigrants, an archetypal American scene. I love being in their midst.

Mostly, however, I write at home so I can read my stuff aloud to my wife who’s reading about Putin’s criminal aggression against Ukraine. If I can make her laugh, when she has him on her mind, then I know it’s good. (Does Vlad know that “poot” is an American child’s word for farting? Does it mean the same in Russian? And why is it the middle syllable of “computer”?) But I digress.

I passed a café the other day with a sign in the window, “No Laptops,” which I tried not to take personally but of course I can understand that cafés want good eaters, not struggling writers who’d come in and order a cup of hot water and bring their own tea bag and occupy space for two hours to work on their mournful memoir about growing up with an unmarried Mennonite mom in Menomonie. Nonetheless, why welcome customers with a warning? The no-laptop rule suggests that maybe newspaper reading is off the table or checking the phone for email. It also suggests that if you misuse a nonrestrictive clause, the waiter may step over and correct you.

I was cured of writing mournful memoirs by meeting readers of mine, one advantage of having a tiny audience, and many of them are teaching third grade, which is exhausting work, or they’re therapists listening all day to depressed patients, which is depressing, or they work for executive vice presidents and resist the temptation to spit in his coffee, and so I set aside my memoir, This Strange Persistent Pain In My Lower Back, and I put the poot in Putin and this amused her. She had just returned from a long walk in Central Park where, she reported, a bird had pooped on her black jacket and she went to wash it. New York is a major flyway and the Park attracts birdwatchers from all over, you hear Arabic and Slavic and French and German, and inevitably a bird flies over and makes its mark on us. Accept it as a blessing.

My Ukrainian friend Peter Ostroushko didn’t live to see this moment of history, but I think of him often, and if you have a few minutes you could Google Pete playing “Heart of the Heartland” on YouTube and think of Russian tanks closing in on that mandolin player, and it will break your heart in two. As for the other stuff, history, culture, politics, economics, you’ll have to ask someone else.

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What you won’t read in the paper, except now

I was born in 1942, a year that hasn’t been recent for a long time and now I’m strolling toward 80, an age when I can stop feeling bad that I never finished reading Moby-Dick. I got to page 20 and Melville hadn’t even gotten them on the boat yet. At 80 I put the idea of self-improvement behind me once and for all. I have considered cosmetic surgery, a muscle implant around my mouth so that I can grin, but once you start corrective surgery, you may go on to have a chest lift or butt reduction and your belly button winds up in your armpit and your butt comes out lopsided so you’ll need to wear orthopedic pants. So I accept myself as is.

As for IQ, it’s in trouble. I was a columnist for the Washington Post back in the fall of 2016 when I realized that H.L. Mencken had done it so much better when he wrote, “A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in. The men the American people admire most are the most daring liars; the men they detest most are those who try to tell them the truth. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will get their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” That day arrived, so I got out of journalism and resumed having fun.

A journalist is someone who believes that any closet may contain a minister who is canoodling with the organist. I don’t feel that way. I am not good with harsh reality. I put the tenderloin in the frying pan and see the red juice, I don’t think “blood,” I think juice. I don’t think, “This is the raw flesh of a living creature,” I think it’s steak. Call it escapism, call it eschatology, call it the escalator at Macy’s, it’s how I operate. I believe the sun will shine and she’ll be mine till the end of time and I’ll never be lonely any more, and if I am, I just need to sing the song again. We are all better off for the fact I am not now, nor have I ever been, your president. I know this and now you do too.

People can be deferential to an old man, there’s always the threat of a lifetime achievement award or a copper plate with your name on it screwed to a pew at church. But you resist this. I’m a Christian but not a good one and I focus on the easy stuff, the Good Shepherd, Jesus healing the lunatic, sunbeams bursting through storm clouds, and I skip the hard parts. I wouldn’t read the Book of Revelation if you put a pistol to my head. “Love your neighbor as yourself” is easy if you live in a nice neighborhood but love your enemies? Those who persecute you? Not a problem for me since I avoided persecution by keeping my mouth shut. Meekness has been my salvation, so to speak. Jesus said the meek shall inherit the earth, and so far all we’ve gotten is Minnesota and parts of North Dakota, but that’s enough.

At my alma mater, the inscription on the auditorium said that men are ennobled by understanding, but smart people do dumb things all the time. Some people with a Ph.D. in nutrition are helpless when they see golden arches ahead and put on dark glasses and pull up to the drive-up window and order seven Big Macs and go to a dim cul-de-sac and stuff their mouths.

Some morning I’ll get out of bed with an awful aching in my head and can’t find my shoes and I’ll say, “Good morning, blues,” but not this morning, I made coffee, it tasted fine, not at all like turpentine, and my good woman hasn’t left me, she’s right here, and as Solomon said, “The race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong,” so do your best to be lucky. Say what you will, life is good. Newspapers don’t report this, just as they don’t report that the sun comes up in the east and H and C stand for Hot and Cold — you’re supposed to know these things. And you do. I know you do.

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I’m done with regret, thinking about a bagel

Lent is upon us starting Wednesday except for us old fundamentalists for whom it is a yearlong observance. We didn’t go to movies or imbibe euphoric beverages or use tobacco or read fiction and, for fear it might lead to dancing, we didn’t even tap our feet or sing rhythmically, and so Lent was merely Catholics imitating us, and now, in my twilight years, I’ve already given up most of the things I might easily sacrifice, such as Debussy, for example. I can’t stand Debussy. I never could. Same with superhero movies, chicken livers, buttermilk, chin-ups, Henry James, the list goes on.

To us old Brethrenites, the idea of Lent, forty days of repentance, is odd: we sat under serious preaching about imminent death and so we were told to repent NOW, this very moment, which was problematic for me as a child, listening to the preacher describe the sinking of the Titanic, souls swept into eternity, which could happen to us at any moment, though we were not out on the Atlantic but on 14th Avenue in south Minneapolis, so I should repent and come to the Lord now, immediately, but I felt this should involve weeping, falling to my knees, not just checking a box but crying out to heaven, overwhelmed with feeling, but how can you overwhelm yourself? I couldn’t. I envied Southerners their emotional liquidity. We of the northern latitudes did not have their latitude.

In church a couple weeks ago, someone mentioned a course to help us on our spiritual journey during Lent, and the term “spiritual journey” is one of those clichés that clicks my OFF switch. I am not on a journey, I’m simply crossing the street watching the WALK sign click off the seconds, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, as I think about being run over and killed and I arrive on the other side with two seconds to spare. The story of my life. I’m a lucky man.

I read of the lives of saints such as Paul Farmer, the physician and anthropologist who died recently in Rwanda. He was a Harvard grad who devoted himself to public health in impoverished areas, Haiti, Africa, Mexico, the Navajo Nation, training doctors, opening hospitals, going door to door when necessary to treat the sick. I know a few saints personally and it can be difficult to strike up a conversation with a saint. My cousin, Alec, for example, an astrophysicist who aligned himself with suffering people and hiked across parts of Africa and the Middle East to see life close up. I walked with him in silence to the cemetery for his grandma’s interment and all I could think of was the terrible joke about Jesus on the cross calling to Peter three times and Peter saying, “What, Lord?” and Jesus saying, “Peter, I can see my house from here.” God help me. Talk about inappropriate. Beyond the pale. I am confessing a sin to you, dear reader, because, after a lifetime as a writer, I love you as never before. Back in my youth when I was brilliant and beyond understanding, I was superior to you but I got over it, thanks to a number of truly dumb things I’ve done that were dumber than anything you’ve ever heard, dumber than dirt, which I may tell you about someday when you’re older and more sympathetic, but not now.

For Lent I wish to give up sadness and regret, which I’ve clung to long enough, and try something else. The COVID lockdown gave us a long stretch of sacrifice, life reduced to the essentials, though my love and I did go out to a restaurant the other night, sitting outdoors under a heat lamp on a bitterly cold night, just for the romance of it, came home frozen and lay embraced under a comforter to warm up. It was an unintentional moment of beauty, presented by happenstance.

And now I’m thinking of the bagel my wife says she’s going to go out and bring back for me, a fresh sesame seed bagel with cream cheese with scallions. I am already grateful though she hasn’t left yet; I’m grateful for the anticipation. I respect Debussy in principle but this bagel is more important than his misty music. Toasted light brown, the cream cheese melting around the fringe. She is still sitting, working the crossword puzzle, but this bagel is turning into the high point of my day, the bagel of all bagels, the bagel Hegel would’ve finagled with Puccini’s cream cheese and scallions that win medallions from Italians.

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Why I’m not running for anything whatsoever

When I come to Presidents Day, I remember the pictures of Lincoln and Washington hanging side by side over the blackboard in the front of Estelle Shaver’s first-grade classroom at Benson School and I thought they were married since Washington’s locks looked ladylike and I didn’t know them from the $1 or $5 bills, I only knew Adam and Eve and Mary and Joseph from my Bible Families storybook. And now Benson School is demolished, Estelle has gone to her reward, blackboards are green, and the pictures have been replaced by — I don’t know what — Snoop Dogg and Taylor Swift?

This is why we need millennials to rise up and take over; there are too many people my age in power whose minds are like attics, packed with disposable antiques. I want someone to be elected president who doesn’t remember the era of doo-wop and long-distance phone calls. These memories take up brain space that could be used to replace fossil fuels with solar and wind.

My generation had no memory of the Depression, which enabled us to create rock ’n’ roll, but tell me: what did rock ’n’ roll contribute to the world other than make a few people enormously rich? I was a Beach Boys fan and every so often, without warning, the line “Catch a wave, you’ll be sitting on top of the world” goes through my head. This alone disqualifies me for any position of public responsibility.

Presidents Day was created to combine the February birthdays of Abe and Georgette Lincoln, but it lacks a clear purpose, and I propose that it be devoted to hearing potential candidates under 50, Gretchen Whitmer, Tom Cotton, Chris Sununu, bring them on, give them twenty minutes of national TV time, and simultaneously hold a plebiscite to lower the age of eligibility for Congress to 18 and let’s get some young minds in the chamber to whom Reagan and Humphrey are just names.

I am going on the premise that decades of repetitive experience is not a great learning experience. I support Uncle Joe but his thirty-six years in the Senate did not serve him well and hobnobbing in hallways and giving speeches to an empty chamber are not edifying activities. It would’ve been good for him or any other senator to take a two-year sabbatical and teach tenth-grade history.

So I propose lowering the age for the presidency to 30. If a person doesn’t have a good grip on things by then, too bad, but we need to hear them and let my age group shut up.

I happen to admire the waitress/bartender from Queens who, deep in college debt, grieved by the death of her dad, was inspired to run for Congress and whupped an old Irish pol who was out of touch with the district, and off she went to Washington. A person can learn a lot about human foibles from tending bar and she came to Congress full of p&v and has stood up well to the opposition’s attempts to slime her and I think Rep. Ocasio-Cortez should find a broader audience and talk to farmers and truckers and also geezers like me.

I don’t think classrooms have a front anymore, the kids face in toward the middle, it’s holistic, and the children’s artwork hangs on the walls, rather than the sad bearded man and his fierce wife with the bad teeth. Maybe politics and government are outmoded and our problems will be addressed by science, which has been the case lately. Democrats and Republicans have lived in the shadow of Apple and Microsoft and Amazon and Google, and perhaps the White House is only a straw man whom we hold responsible for the perils of life and throw on the bonfire and find a new straw man.

I don’t know. That’s my motto now. I failed to catch the wave and became a beach toy lying in the shallows amid flotsam and jetsam and I’m cheering for my millennial nieces and nephews to dash past me and launch themselves onto the enormous wave of 2022 and go flying on the tide of good fortune and I will go sit under an umbrella. I’m an American and I love the story of the Latina waitress who beat the old white guy. It’s an iconic American story. Talent wins out. Smarts beat clichés. The quick lightweight KOs the big palooka. So do it.

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The little-known benefits of raw oysters perhaps

I took up eating oysters on the half shell back in my late twenties, as a token of eastern sophistication. I was in New York and my editor took me to lunch and ordered a dozen and asked if I’d like some. “Of course,” I said, not wanting to seem provincial, and ate three, which resembled phlegm but with horseradish were palatable and went down easily, no chewing required.

Last week, passing through the lovely town of Easton, Maryland, across Chesapeake Bay from Baltimore, I enjoyed six Chesapeake oysters, which were larger, meatier, than the ones in New York fifty years ago and a man sitting next to me at the bar asked how they were — “They’re very good, they must be wild,” I said — and he said, “You’re from Minnesota, aren’t you.” I said yes. I did not say, “But I live in New York.” It doesn’t matter where you live, you’re still from where you’re from. Provincial is baked into my blood and I can’t escape it by wearing a nice suit or eating seafood, I’m still from the land of the Spam sandwich.

The gentleman said he’d driven through Minnesota once when he was twenty. Under the influence of reading Jack Kerouac, he’d driven from his home in Maine to Oregon and in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, he had pitched his tent in the cemetery and spent a peaceful night there.

“I used to live not far from there, in Freeport, in a rented farmhouse,” I said. He had loved Kerouac’s On The Road and started writing poetry in a flowing lowercase unpunctuated run-on style and spent some time in Oregon considering a Beat life but returned east to college and wound up a pediatrician. He loved Kerouac but he did not admire the heedless Beat lifestyle that wrecked the lives of so many and he was happy in medicine though he still enjoyed camping. He said, “I notice the defibrillator in your chest. Do you mind?” and he reached over and put his hand on it. He said, “Do you ever feel it kick in?” I shook my head. “Then you’re in a good shape,” he said.

It was a bonus, to get a professional opinion along with the oysters, and also to meet a man who confessed to being happy about his life. Kerouac should’ve met him, a man who enjoyed rambunctious prose but dedicated himself to a highly disciplined career in science. He asked what I did, I said, “I’m retired.” No point in getting into all that. I too am a happy man, though in Minnesota I was brought up to conceal pleasure lest it make the less fortunate feel bad. But it was a very happy day in Easton. A self-righteous Democrat finds it hard to say that — I should be bemoaning something — but I felt utterly happy.

I could imagine living in this town of 16,000. I had grown up in a town that size and escaped from it by eating those New York oysters but now it appealed to me. The pandemic has made our lives smaller anyway. I walked around the downtown of elegant old brick buildings and went to a show at the old Avalon Theatre at which the audience was in a jolly mood and sang the national anthem and on the line, “Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,” they shouted the “Oh.” The hotel bed was comfortable, I had a big breakfast.

The next morning I was at Union Station in Washington to catch a train to New York and stepped onto a Down escalator and got myself and a suitcase aboard but my briefcase stayed behind and I looked back and saw it getting smaller and tried to run up the descending steps and made no progress but the briefcase contained my laptop with a good deal of work in the hard drive and I tried to climb faster and couldn’t, while toting the suitcase, and finally, not wanting to have a heart attack and die, I descended and I saw three young women laughing, sitting at a table drinking coffee, with two young children who were laughing too. They were laughing at me and now I could imagine how it looked, a scene from a Buster Keaton movie, man versus machine, and it pleased me, my debut in slapstick comedy, and I recovered the briefcase, and headed for home, a happy man, and if that’s what Chesapeake Bay oysters can do for you, then I hope to make them part of my daily diet.

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Valentine’s Day: a reminder to men

We’ve been sort of mesmerized by the Winter Olympics and dangerously thin athletes speedskating, one hand behind the back, taking the turns semi-horizontally, and others flying off a ski jump spinning in the air so as to give their mothers cardiac arrest, and downhill events won by a margin of one-hundredth of a second, and all of it taking place in arid hills near Beijing, on artificial snow, and then seeing the Italians win gold in curling, which is like Bryn Mawr placing first in boxing. One astonishment after another, but I’ve kept my eye on Monday the 14th knowing that attention must be paid.

I am contracted to the woman I love but the vow to love and honor (at the altar, I whispered the word “obey” to myself) left out a great deal, such as “take careful aim at the middle of the toilet bowl” and “when asked what you’d like for dinner, the correct answer is ‘a green salad with oil and vinegar, please.’” Over the 26 years of marriage, other addenda have attached to the contract, including “do not give me articles of clothing as gifts because I will only have to donate them to the Salvation Army.”

I remembered the 14th when I walked into the drugstore to pick up a Baby Ruth candy bar, which is a vitamin supplement for a man on a green leafy diet, and I saw the aisle stocked with garish scarlet heart-shaped trash, gifts so ugly they’d be grounds for divorce. Who buys this dreck? Men who just realized on their way home that it is the 14th and there is no time to shop around.

It’s easy for the Day to slip up on a person, since there’s no St. Valentine’s Day service at church, but it’s an important day especially for us Northerners of Anglo/German/Scandinavian persuasion who were brought up to be cautious with declarations of affection, who are not huggers, who save “I love you” for birthdays and anniversaries and don’t say it in front of the children. This day is meant for us. We ignore it at our peril.

Flowers are a better idea than chocolate but the best idea is a poem. For example:

You and I, my dear love,
Are a pair I am gladly part of,
Like carrots and peas,
Or salami and cheese
And when push comes to shove,
We fit like a hand in a glove,
Snug as the hug
Of two bugs in a rug,
Or birds in a nest up above.

A double limerick. A sonnet would be better, but you don’t want to write a third-rate sonnet especially if your true love is someone who actually reads poetry. You could, of course, simply write, with a good fountain pen, Shakespeare’s “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” or if you’ve never been in disgrace, Liz Browning’s “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” or Robert Dylan’s “I’ll be your baby tonight” but only if your penmanship is good. A love poem that looks like it was written by a child or a physician is not a good idea.

Valentine’s Day was traumatic for me as a child because I was shy, not a popular kid, and I had a home haircut that was not nicely tapered in back but was cut in a series of terraces, and I desperately wanted to be liked and when I looked at my valentines from classmates, I could see that they were the inexpensive kind that came six to a page and were torn out along a dotted line, and the edges had little bumps. Mine were bumpy valentines, not particularly meaningful.

If you’re reading this Monday morning and you have no valentine and she’s still in the shower, write my double limerick on a card and sign it and give it to her. Don’t say I wrote it; claim it as your own. She doesn’t want a valentine from me, she wants one from you. And put your arms around her and tell her she’s your best friend and she makes your life wonderful. It’s an important moment for old lovers, this meaningful embrace. The woman knows all the worst things about you, every single one except your undercover work for Rafael Trujillo, she knows your messiness, your ineptitude, your extensive ignorance, but she stands by you. God bless her. He’s already blessed you. Without our wives, we’d be living in a boxcar, sniffing glue, and would’ve missed the Winter Olympics, and been mesmerized by hoot owls calling, “HOOOO!” Who? Her, of course. Who else?

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Valentine’s day: a reminder to men

We’ve been sort of mesmerized by the Winter Olympics and dangerously thin athletes speedskating, one hand behind the back, taking the turns semi-horizontally, and others flying off a ski jump spinning in the air so as to give their mothers cardiac arrest, and downhill events won by a margin of one-hundredth of a second, and all of it taking place in arid hills near Beijing, on artificial snow, and then seeing the Italians win gold in curling, which is like Bryn Mawr placing first in boxing. One astonishment after another, but I’ve kept my eye on Monday the 14th knowing that attention must be paid.

I am contracted to the woman I love but the vow to love and honor (at the altar, I whispered the word “obey” to myself) left out a great deal, such as “take careful aim at the middle of the toilet bowl” and “when asked what you’d like for dinner, the correct answer is ‘a green salad with oil and vinegar, please.’” Over the 26 years of marriage, other addenda have attached to the contract, including “do not give me articles of clothing as gifts because I will only have to donate them to the Salvation Army.”

I remembered the 14th when I walked into the drugstore to pick up a Baby Ruth candy bar, which is a vitamin supplement for a man on a green leafy diet, and I saw the aisle stocked with garish scarlet heart-shaped trash, gifts so ugly they’d be grounds for divorce. Who buys this dreck? Men who just realized on their way home that it is the 14th and there is no time to shop around.

It’s easy for the Day to slip up on a person, since there’s no St. Valentine’s Day service at church, but it’s an important day especially for us Northerners of Anglo/German/Scandinavian persuasion who were brought up to be cautious with declarations of affection, who are not huggers, who save “I love you” for birthdays and anniversaries and don’t say it in front of the children. This day is meant for us. We ignore it at our peril.

Flowers are a better idea than chocolate but the best idea is a poem. For example:

You and I, my dear love,
Are a pair I am gladly part of,
Like carrots and peas,
Or salami and cheese
And when push comes to shove,
We fit like a hand in a glove,
Snug as the hug
Of two bugs in a rug,
Or birds in a nest up above.

A double limerick. A sonnet would be better, but you don’t want to write a third-rate sonnet especially if your true love is someone who actually reads poetry. You could, of course, simply write, with a good fountain pen, Shakespeare’s “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” or if you’ve never been in disgrace, Liz Browning’s “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” or Robert Dylan’s “I’ll be your baby tonight” but only if your penmanship is good. A love poem that looks like it was written by a child or a physician is not a good idea.

Valentine’s Day was traumatic for me as a child because I was shy, not a popular kid, and I had a home haircut that was not nicely tapered in back but was cut in a series of terraces, and I desperately wanted to be liked and when I looked at my valentines from classmates, I could see that they were the inexpensive kind that came six to a page and were torn out along a dotted line, and the edges had little bumps. Mine were bumpy valentines, not particularly meaningful.

If you’re reading this Monday morning and you have no valentine and she’s still in the shower, write my double limerick on a card and sign it and give it to her. Don’t say I wrote it; claim it as your own. She doesn’t want a valentine from me, she wants one from you. And put your arms around her and tell her she’s your best friend and she makes your life wonderful. It’s an important moment for old lovers, this meaningful embrace. The woman knows all the worst things about you, every single one except your undercover work for Rafael Trujillo, she knows your messiness, your ineptitude, your extensive ignorance, but she stands by you. God bless her. He’s already blessed you. Without our wives, we’d be living in a boxcar, sniffing glue, and would’ve missed the Winter Olympics, and been mesmerized by hoot owls calling, “HOOOO!” Who? Her, of course. Who else?

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Thoughts about toothpaste and patriotism

I am severely irked by the silver security foil protecting the tip of my tube of toothpaste, which I must pry off with my thumbnail before I can squeeze Colgate onto my toothbrush. It suggests that insidious persons are out to poison me via my habit of twice-daily brushing. When I order a cheeseburger in a café, it doesn’t come to me locked in a tin box; when I go to the barber, she doesn’t offer me a metal shield to prevent her from cutting my throat; the oranges in the grocery store don’t come wrapped in steel foil to prevent evil persons from injecting strychnine with a hypodermic: why the security cap on the Colgate?

I buy Colgate because they sponsored The Colgate Comedy Hour with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, a very classy show, and also I assume that Colgate University gets a percentage of the price; I know nothing about the toothpaste. I assume that all toothpaste is alike, Crest or Pepsodent or Natalie’s Natural, that probably it’s all made in a factory in Topeka. But the little silver foil offers a taste of paranoia that I don’t need.

Once you start imagining toothpaste terrorism, you can go down a road that leads to a single life in an old RV in the corner of the parking lot of an abandoned factory in Scranton, and I choose to live in New York and walk along the street without imagining someone on the 14th floor dropping a toaster on my head. It’s a wonderful life, as Jimmy Stewart told us long ago when the angel prevented him from jumping off the bridge in Bedford Falls on Christmas Eve.

The movie got mixed reviews and was a box office bust when it came out in 1946 and eventually became a classic on everyone’s list of all-time great flicks, which gives hope to all of us unsuccessful writers whose work disappeared without a trace, but never mind that. I like to think I live in a world where people care about each other. In New York, I’ve seen elderly persons take a tumble and within seconds, three or four helpful strangers are at their side, saying, “Are you okay? Don’t get up. Where do you live? Can we call you a cab?” and someday I may be one of those elderly persons and count on friendly strangers. The contemplation of toothpaste tampering is a poisonous thought.

I am at an age when one is grateful for every day. I find this overwhelming. There is no room for paranoia. I don’t remember ever being so happy as I am these days. I was brought up, as many Minnesotans were, not to express personal happiness lest it hurt the feelings of the less fortunate and if asked “How are you?” you should say, “Not bad,” never go beyond “Okay,” but I am grateful for it all. I’m glad I never bought a summer cabin and spent my vacations repairing things. I am grateful for home because I know how the shower works. I’m grateful for the wireless phone that enables you to go into the next room for privacy. We didn’t have unscrewable bottle caps years ago so we spent hours, days, weeks, years, searching for a bottle opener. I’m grateful for growing up strict fundamentalist, which makes the idea of romance terribly thrilling, the thought of putting your arm around a girl — Oh my God! — and this stays with me all these years later and when my wife awakens in the morning and comes into the kitchen and sits on my lap and I put my hands on her shoulders, it is terribly exciting, thanks to the preaching against carnal desire. I am also thankful for Eskimo Christians. Eskimo Christians, I’ll tell you no lies.

I enjoy reading the paper for its sense of impending doom, which is similar to the preachers of my youth, and journalists note the melting ice cap, the racial violence, the persistence of COVID, political inertia, the specter of American authoritarianism, the vulnerability of toothpaste, but this is a great country that gave the world baseball, the blues, the bacon cheeseburger, not to mention Irving Berlin, the Bethel Gospel Quartet, Balanchine, Robert Bly, Billie Holiday, and Bob & Ray, and the other night in Georgia, I stood in front of a crowd and started them singing the national anthem a cappella in a comfortable key, no ballpark organ drowning them out, and they all knew the words and sang with sweet enthusiasm. I did it for no reason other than to hear it done and it was remarkable. I wish you’d been there.

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