Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 39

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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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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