Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 4

A June morning, assessing the situation

June is here, the sun shines, the birds sing, and I feel the mood lift probably because we’re spending a week in rural Connecticut with no Times landing at the front door every morning. Ecclesiastes says, “Whoever increases knowledge increases sorrow” and that certainly has been true of the Times front page this year. With a very active adolescent president, it’s good to take a break to restore one’s belief in human progress.

Of course the country is deeply divided. This week the Supreme Court declined to take up Maryland and Rhode Island’s ban on AR-15 semi-automatic rifles, which are legal in most states. I don’t know anybody who owns one and if a friend of mine showed me his AR-15 I’d feel funny about him, same as if he showed me his collection of photographs of corpses.

I am old enough to remember riding in the front seat of my dad’s car, standing on the seat beside him as he drove at high speed on twisty roads. Exciting to me at the time but now I can imagine my violent death at the age of six and I am grateful for the seat belt. It was accomplished over the objections of libertarians who felt the government had no right to require restraints, but the restraints were required and though there may be Shakers in rural Maine who claim the religious right to fasten them behind their backs, not around their fronts, they’ve been accepted by 99% of us.

Tampering with smoke detectors in airliner lavatories is now illegal. It didn’t used to be. You used to board a plane and run the risk of a chain-smoker sitting beside you. Now smokers are lonely outlaws rejected by society same as cat stranglers or monument molesters. I don’t know any smokers myself. I was a two-pack-a-day man, addicted to the trinity of a cup of coffee, a typewriter, and a pack of Luckies, and I quit in 1982 by the simple method of not doing it anymore, thereby earning an extra decade, maybe more. An outstanding example of rationalism in my life.

But now I worry about the invasions of technology changing what it’s like to be young. I grew up near the Mississippi River, which my mother warned me not to go near, especially after my cousin Roger drowned, but she couldn’t enforce the ban, having five other children as she did, and I was a good liar, so it was easy to slip away down a dirt road and through the trees and across a ravine and there it was, the magnificent river, flowing down the middle of America, and me, wading into the rapids, thinking of maybe building a raft like Huck Finn’s, and floating toward Iowa, Missouri, and what we used to call the Gulf of Mexico.

Nowadays a boy would have a smartphone in his pocket and his mother could track him and she’d punish him by seizing the phone and the magnificence of the river would not compensate him for the loss of texting and he’d accept his loss of freedom.

I loved the river. Texting is all small talk, Whassup? Where you? I sat on a big rock, bare feet in the water, contemplating great questions: What is it like to be twenty-one or even thirty? And death — what’s that like? What would you do if communists made you choose between renouncing God and drinking a pitcher of warm spit? What would it be like to put your arms around a girl? I’d seen it done by older kids but never tried it myself. What would it feel like? Would we talk? Would I kiss her or should I wait for her to kiss me?

These great riverfront questions are what leads a person to take up writing as a means of self-discovery, and now I worry about chatbot applications giving a kid a quick shortcut to creating stories. Give the bot access to your email and tell it to make you a superhero worshipped by the girls in your class and out come 4,000 words in an accomplished format with dozens of personal references.

As I ponder this, my love has come in the house with her phone and a picture she took of a turtle in the yard. She has used Google Turtle Search to identify it as a snapping turtle. This knowledge causes me no sorrow at all but I do wonder what it’d be like to put my arms around her and so I do. And then I let go so I can write this last sentence.

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Let’s join together, people, and hold hands

The world is advancing at a rapid pace and it’s hard to keep up. Last weekend, I learned about a liquid hand soap that smells like fresh-cut grass, an Earl Grey ice cream, and an app that when you snap a picture of a tree with your phone, it will tell you it’s a catalpa and the bird singing in it is a tufted titmouse.

Earl Grey is a tea, not an ice cream, just as Jim Clothes is what it is and would you make ice cream that tastes of perspiration?

But the tree and bird app strikes me as heading down a treacherous road. People go to college to study forestry or ornithology and if it’s all available on your phone, what will we do with all the buildings with the pillars in front? Turn them into Halls of Fame? Mortuaries? Probably there is an architecture app that tells you if the recess in a building is a nook, cranny, cove, crypt, carrel, or apse. Perhaps a medical app to examine people’s laps and say if they’re likely to collapse. With AI hovering in the wings, ready to simulate writing, probably a sixth-grade education will be enough for anybody. But sixth-graders playing football is nothing that millions of Americans will wish to watch. We may need to go back to public stonings for our entertainment.

My grandma dearly wanted to attend the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 so she could hear the human voice recorded on discs and ride the Ferris wheel, but now innovations come so fast that by the time you organized a fair, it’d be an antique show.

The ice cream shop that sold Earl Grey was on the main drag of Chester, Connecticut, a town that strives to look as Colonial as possible: no Walmart, no FedEx, no Apple store or Whole Foods, just a string of little craft shops and cafes. A hamburger is $15, to keep out the riffraff. You can buy artisanal lace curtains and handcrafted candles but for dental care you’d need to leave the 18th century and drive to a contemporary town.

I bought a cone with two scoops of vanilla. I’ve accepted my own vanillaness for years. Back in the Seventies when independence was in vogue, people wore buttons and badges and T-shirts with humorous or meaningful or symbolic inscriptions to demonstrate individuality, and guys I knew who’d once followed the Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy model, grew their hair down to their shoulders and wrote fractured poetry and attempted to be Buddhist. But they had to face the fact that good jobs for Buddhist poets are hard to find and you may spend your 20s living in your parents’ basement.

Not a good idea unless the parents are wealthy and own numerous homes and you can live in the basement of one they’re not occupying.

My parent weren’t wealthy and they were fundamentalists and I was brought up to keep my distance from unbelievers, so I was painfully independent through childhood and in my adult life I longed to belong to the majority. I loved popular songs, I adopted a dreamy liberal point of view, observed the Fourth, and went to ball games and stood with the others and sang the national anthem.

I went to a graduation ceremony in May and a soprano did the anthem in her key and we listened as she hit a high C on “free” and I realized I haven’t heard a crowd sing it since I was a kid.

Maybe people are put off by the rockets and bombs, I don’t know. But I believe America needs an anthem. So I’ve rewritten it. Wherever you are reading this, at the breakfast table or on a bus or in a cafeteria, I’d like you to sing it aloud, softly, to the tune you know quite well. Just do it.

O say, can you see

From the Florida shore

To the vast open plains

And the mountains of Utah,

From Yellowstone Park to Columbia Gorge

To the hills of Fairbanks

And the beaches of Maui.

And Washington’s halls and Niagara Falls

The beauty of forest and farmland calls,

O say, don’t you love this land you must save,

The land of the free and the home of the brave.  

It isn’t Woke, it’s not about America First, it is to some extent about Diversity in that the plains and the gorge and Fairbanks and Maui are distinctly different.

You’re welcome.

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Underwood man confronts an algorithm

The most infuriating website in the country is Amtrak’s and buying a one-way ticket from Manhattan to Old Saybrook the other day brought me to the verge of pulling out a pistol and blowing the laptop to pieces but I don’t own a pistol and there’s a decent novel in the hard drive, but I was seriously irked. But it’s good to be irked, good for the heart, good for the disposition. Calm is greatly overrated as an attitude. I’ve suffered from an excess of it for years.

The infuriation, of course, was my fault. I am a museum piece from back in the manual typewriter era, tapping on an Underwood, a handsome machine now found in antique stores and journalism schools in impoverished countries. I haven’t punched Underwood keys since I was in my twenties. I still like to take a good pen and a yellow legal pad and sit and write. I believe there’s a circuit between hand and eye that can produce sentences more elegant than the one I’m typing now on a laptop. But the laptop is my main instrument. I prefer it for its vast ability to Delete. Using the cursor I can gray out whole passages and poking the little red dot at the top of the file I could, if I wish, make thousands of words vanish from the world without a trace and never bothering anybody ever again. There’s something heroic about doing this. You can burn a paper manuscript but nobody ever does, they accumulate and turn yellowish and wind up in an archive.

Deletion is noble. Someday, if necessary, I wish to be deleted myself. There is a time to exit and if the body hangs on, then steps must be taken. I want my people to put me in a small room with a glass of Scotch, a pack of smokes, an audio of one of Mr. Trump’s three-hour campaign speeches, and a .38 pistol, and let that be the end of it.

The drawback of the laptop is its power to distract. A man is busy about the task of writing something sensible and useful and shining light into dark corners, and then succumbs to the temptation of sending Google into other dark corners, such as the mystery of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance and how much was Howard Hughes worth and did the Beatles sing on Ed Sullivan’s show or was it lip-synched and do Ukrainians consider themselves to be Russian and has anyone located the Ten Commandments and was Beowulf a real person and did Teddy Roosevelt kill any beasts on his African safaris or did he only pose with a rifle, and was J.D. Salinger happy after he vanished from public view, and is it true that Albert Einstein was unable to sail a small boat, and how soon as a rule do famous people become unknown.

Scripture says: “Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” This is the Buddhist side of the Christian faith. On the other hand, Scripture says, “All things work together for good to them that love God,” which has not always been true in my case. Perhaps my aims are not high enough. In church on Sunday, we sang, “Lord, lift me up and help me stand by faith on heaven’s tableland,” and I am not sure what, at 82, I hope to be lifted up to, other than to be a happy old man. A cheerful old coot who’s grateful for longevity and not wishing for immortality. Mother got to 97 in good shape but she did gardening, vacuuming, mopping, and used a washboard and hung heavy laundry on clotheslines, a better workout than what you get with pen and paper.

We live in a golden age of American journalism. Heroic work is being done on all sides, graceful, honest writing, sometimes wildly funny. The times demand it. The sheer corruption, stupidity, and arrogance at the top demand journalists be soldiers and I see bravery everywhere I look. I don’t do that sort of journalism but I admire it. I am simply a passenger on the train, a spectator at the show. The show is summer, the American people afoot, taking the sun, families gathering, their decency and good humor apparent for all to see. This age era is passing, a new one is soon to arrive. This piggish president with his lavish contempt for people does not represent us and he will be stopped.

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A night at the opera, my dear

We went to see Richard Strauss’s “Salome” at the Metropolitan Opera Wednesday night, or let’s say that my love went and I went with her, she because she loves opera and I because I don’t know enough about opera to be critical, I like everything just fine. But this opera was different. Men do not come off well in “Salome,” you’ve got King Herod for one thing and Salome’s dad who is weird and scenes with lewd men and little girls that make you not want to read the subtitles. There are men wearing ram’s heads and John the Baptist chained in the dungeon and more mental illness than in most operas but it’s in German. The music has its dissonant edges but it’s gorgeous, played by the 100-piece Met orchestra. So you have weirdness and insanity set to beautiful music, Salome wandering around singing “I want to kiss his lips” after the prophet’s head has been chopped off. There’s no intermission so it’s hard to leave early.

I went to see it, in part, because my friend Ellie Dehn was covering the role of Salome in this production. “Covering” means that she learned an extremely difficult role with a lot of crazy acting and was no more than 15 minutes from the Met before each performance and was focused and ready so that if the star soprano got out of a cab and was run down by a pizza delivery guy on a bike, Ellie would rush in, put on the white gown, and do the show, hit the high notes, be insane, do the Dance of the Seven Veils, so that nobody would feel cheated. It’s an impossible job, to be up for a heroic performance, knowing that the odds of your doing it are slim to none, but the roles have to be covered. Baseball postpones, parades cancel, opera doesn’t.

The performance started a little late, which gave me hope that the star had maybe twisted her ankle and I imagine Ellie coming out and being insanely great and get eight bows and wow the opera world, go on to star as Lucia and Lady MacBeth, a great career for a girl from Anoka, Minnesota, but no, it was not her night. She stayed home and did the crossword.

The opera ends with three big chords, whomp whomp whomp, and the curtain comes down and the audience lets out a roar, the principals take bows, the prophet and the seductress get the loudest ovations, she takes hers and comes downstage to acknowledge the prompter in the box who has been shouting cues at everyone all evening, and the crowd heads for the exit, stunned, most of them, whereas for me, the ignoramus, it was just another festive evening among a fascinating crowd, most of them younger than I. Grand opera is hip in New York, there’s a definite gay presence, and some people like to dress up, maybe dramatically, do daring things that draw attention, weave beads into their hair, wear a flashy frock, bare the chest, glow, glitter, but not at “Salome” — when a saint who foretold the coming of the Savior is beheaded, even New Yorkers show restraint.

We flowed out onto the plaza, a chilly May night, people were dazed, even I was, we’d seen something stupendous even if we didn’t know what. My beloved led me uptown, her eye out for a taxi, ready to fight off competing operagoers, even as she poured out her complicated feelings of dazzlement, depression, disgust, delight, which I’m sure is what Strauss intended. It was 1902, he could see where the 20th century was headed, and now here we are in the 21st. We have our own Herod, a crueler one, more corrupt, not satisfied to behead one prophet but ambitious to destroy whole institutions, defy courts, indulge his vanity while creating chaos wherever he goes.

Someone could write an opera about him. Herod in love with the interior of a 747 that is outmoded and unsecure. Congress rushing to approve cuts to Medicaid in the middle of the night, a program that 40% of rural kids depend on. A top Cabinet official, asked to explain “habeas corpus,” says it’s a provision in the Constitution that gives Herod the power to deport whomever he wishes. Strauss dealt with serious insanity but our Herod may prove that farce is more dangerous. I don’t want to know. I won’t buy a ticket.

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Sweet corn is ahead, life resumes

I buy my groceries at a gigantic market a few blocks away, owned by some billionaire, don’t know which one or his views on Palestine or if he was at the inauguration or how good a seat he got, I just buy his potatoes and 2% and granola, but the other day I was at my doctor’s a mile away and stopped at another market in the chain and it was quite a different scene. My market is on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and the doctor is on the Upper East. The UE is a young neighborhood of mothers with strollers, the UWS is the domain of grandmas with walkers.

The East branch has things I haven’t seen in the West, such as glass jugs of milk from pasture-grazed cows bottled on the farm and eggs from homing pigeons who get at least an hour of vigorous exercise per day. Vegetables grown in non-pesticided soil fertilized by B.S. collected at Ivy League graduate schools.

What surprised me was the checkout section. At the West market, 26 checkout persons wait by their registers and a herdsman aims you toward the next available. At the East, there are a dozen self-checkout stands and two checkout persons for us elderly and mentally arrested. Thinking that surely a U of M college grad could meet this challenge, I stepped up to the plate and set my three potatoes on the scale and something about the instructions for pricing made me hesitate and an employee nearby yelled, “You need help?” in a tone of voice I would describe as accusatory, not helpful, and I stepped over to the handicapped area and was checked out by a nice person. And in that moment I entered the category of Persons of Special Needs.

I heard a ding in my phone. A digital woman named Priscilla told me to pick up my bags and go to the door. She alerted me to cracks in the sidewalk, the approaching curb, an available cab. She said, “His name is Frank and his last traffic violation was for an illegal U-turn in 2006.”

The world is changing and advanced medical care is going to keep us old honkers around to the point where the world will be weird and we’ll wander around in it like pigeons in a plaza. The English language will flatten under the ministrations of AI and robot buses will transport us and driverless cabs, security cameras will watch us all day and on the first of the month we’ll get a bill for $545 for jaywalking, which we’d done all our lives and are too old to change. At the dentist’s, two mechanical arms guided by laser vision will clean the teeth and fill the cavities and if you doze off and an arm accidentally removes your left nostril, well, you signed the release form. AI surgery can repair the heart, remove tumors, do chestectomies and clototomies, eyelid lifts, butt tucks, shoulder shaping, lap lightening, and automation will lower the price so you’ll meet your cousin Bob six months from now and he’ll look like a new piece of work, the seams visible but nobody will comment.

I brought my groceries back home and put them away. The billionaire had sold me two cucumbers that’d gone soft in the course of shipment from Mexico: Priscilla told me it was my responsibility to check produce for freshness. But the two ears of sweet corn looked good, wrapped in plastic, so I put a pot of water on to boil.

“It’ll boil faster if you put a cover on the pot,” said Priscilla.

I didn’t know how to turn her off so I put her in the medicine chest and closed the four doors between her and the kitchen, and meanwhile the water came to a boil and I put in the corn.

Two minutes later I took it out. It was good. It had no taste except for the butter and salt but it brought back the memory of sweet corn fresh from a field. Evidently ICE had held up the shipment at the border to search for explosive ears. But it brought back the memory of sweet corn and that’s good enough for now. I’ll be in Minnesota in August. Get an Uber driver to take me down 52 to the closest sweet corn stand, take two ears back to the hotel. Microwave them with the husks on, ask Room Service to send up butter and salt. I’ll be a happy guy.

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Sunday afternoon alone in the airport

I’ve often thought that we Midwesterners are the most compliant people on Earth, trusting to the point of accepting insult with a smile, and I thought so again on Sunday when I got the most painful massage of my entire long life. It was at a spa at the airport; I had two hours before my flight, so I signed up for a half hour and lay on a table for sheer bare-knuckle torture. It was deep to the point of being invasive. He may as well have been walking on me with hobnail boots. If I’d had nuclear secrets, I’d have handed them over, the formula for winning lottery numbers, the whereabouts of Amelia Earhart, the origins of the universe, but I lay there not saying a word, not even “Pardon me but could you not attempt to rearrange my bone structure?”

Having been brought up evangelical, I thought maybe this was payment for some transgression but couldn’t think of one except that I’d accidentally taken Jenny’s suitcase instead of my own and so she had to go to a drugstore and buy toothpaste and a toothbrush and borrow clean underwear from her sister. And then the guy bent my right arm back behind my back so hard it made me squeak, and because I need my right arm to sign checks and shake hands, I got off the bed. I did not say, “That was an agonizing massage and I’m going to report you for abuse of the elderly.” I said, “I have to catch my flight.”

I could hardly turn my head. My back hurt. I couldn’t walk straight. I will say this for myself: I did not give the man a tip. I do not reward vicious cruelty.

Where does this wimpiness come from? I’d like to blame my parents who brought us up not to complain, but they were children of the Depression when everyone was living on the edge.

No, I think that, like many people from flat terrain, I simply grew up with a strong sense of my own insignificance that has lasted into my 80s. I lay there under painful punishment for 25 minutes. A New Yorker would have jumped up after 90 seconds and called 911 and filed charges of assault.

I once lost a truckload of money on a real estate scam that I won’t tell you about because you’d only say, “How could a grown person buy into something so obvious? If you’d asked a lawyer, he’d have said ‘Are you kidding?’ and charged you 59 cents for the advice.” If I told you, you’d inform my wife that I need to be put under guardianship and all my PIN numbers taken away.

It’s not blind trust so much as “Who am I to imagine I’m so important that anyone would bother to cheat me?”

And so the good Christian people of the Heartland went ahead and elected the most corrupt and contemptuous president in our 250-year history. Unlike Nixon, he does it openly and boasts about it. He’s the man who never told a joke or made fun of himself or petted a dog or put his arm around a friend who wasn’t bought and paid for.

Hillary Clinton was a good candidate but she lacked a favorite sport and if she had bowled and hit a strike and leaped in the air, and screamed, “Yes!” she’d have won Wisconsin and the White House and we would’ve been spared DeeJay in the yellow pants, but never mind.

Despite my dumb mistakes, I believe in progress. I once put up for five years with a shower knob so calibrated that by turning it an eighth inch you went from Arctic waterfall to fiery brimstone. You had to stand under the showerhead to adjust the knob, not knowing if you’d perish by ice or by fire. But eventually a plumber replaced it. Life goes on. The sun comes up and the sun sets and the Mississippi runs into the Gulf and you can call it whatever you like, it’s the same Gulf. This evening I banged my head on a cupboard door, which I’ve done before and surely will again.

Flannery O’Connor said, “Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.” I did a radio show for forty years based on the world I grew up in, which is gone, and now I’m grateful for life itself, its significance yet to be determined.

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A trip to Rochester for examination

I went to Mayo for some tests this week, a clinic that always puts me in a cheerful mood, even at 6:30 a.m. when the 9th floor receptionist said, “Good morning” and really meant it, and a young woman in blue scrubs led me into a dressing room, where I stripped down to socks and shoes, donned two hospital gowns, was led to a little room full of electronic gizmos and wires and screens, lay down on a cushioned examining table, was IVed and oxygenated, by two women in blue and one of them, Lindsay, laid a warm blanket on me and it was very moving. When you’ve spent the night using powerful laxatives to clean out your insides, this gesture of hospitality is meaningful, and before the doctor stepped in, we fell into friendly conversation as if we’d gone to school together, though they were young enough to be my granddaughters. It made me feel the future was bright. And then, running a magic anesthetic through the IV, they made me disappear.

It was a procedure in which tubes with tiny cameras are poked into your body from both ends, but it was not much more dramatic than a haircut, and there was no bad news after, and all was well.

Years ago, I made my pilgrimage to Mayo, the Lourdes of the North, the Court of Mortality Appeals, and Dr. Dearani installed a new mitral valve in my heart so I didn’t fall prey to the family heart defect and no obituarist at the Daily Planet had to take inventory of my life (“His books were easy to read and contained very few serious grammatical errors.”). Modern medicine has given me 24 years more than Aunt Ruth and Uncle Bob and Uncle Jim got who died in their 50s from the same mitral valve prolapse I have. I remember Grandma sobbing, her shoulders shaking, at Ruth’s funeral, her oldest daughter. But Mayo repaired me nicely and now I’m one year younger than Grandma when she died.

I’ve been rather lucky. I’ve known what I wanted to do with my life since eighth grade when I got a copy of A.J. Liebling’s The Road Back to Paris and read it in an evening and decided I wanted to be a writer. I still do. I went to college so I’d have a good answer for when people asked me, “What are you doing?” I majored in English to become a writer, which is like majoring in physics so you can sail a boat. One cold winter, looking for indoor work, I got a job announcing on a classical music radio station, and I managed to refit my Minnesota accent to sound educated, a great benefit. You can’t hang a degree around your neck but you can learn to sound smart.

Grandma heard me read the noontime news once and said, “It doesn’t sound like him. It sounds like an older man.” Aunt Jo said, “That’s how they talk on the radio.” Grandma listened closely. She heard me introduce a suite with a French name by Maurice Ravel and was impressed by my pronunciation. She would’ve preferred I’d gone into teaching, like her, but at least I had a job.

Through pure serendipity, it led to “A Prairie Home Companion,” which you know all about, and now I’m an old stand-up comic who walks around in the crowd and does a 90-minute set:

God tells us to be righteous but still He

Tells us to lighten our hearts and be silly.

Live in the moment, this moment, here with you, right now,

And let cruelty and stupidity disappear somehow.

It is spring, there is a turn in the weather,

And as George Frideric Handel wrote, let us sing together.

 And I hum a note and they pick it up and we all sing:

Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hal-le-lu-jah.

And then again. They’re surprised at how good they sound. And on it goes from there, some thoughts on the beauty of old age, some stand-up, poetry, stories.

An individual, as we know, is capable of doing great harm, and my aim is to show that one person can make 600 people happy for 90 minutes. And that’s how I hope to justify Mayo’s doing miraculous things for me. You don’t get a new heart valve so you can go play golf, I say. Make yourself useful. Grandma would approve of that. She had high standards and I’m still trying to measure up.

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The powerful drumming of graduation

I flew to Duluth Saturday to an enormous hockey arena to watch my tall handsome grandson in his black robe and mortarboard walk forward and accept his college degree and what made the long trip and the boring ceremony more than worthwhile — essential, imperative — was to witness the delight of his girlfriend, Raina, sitting next to me in the high bleachers, her focus on the processional during “Pomp and Circumstance,” her cry of “There he is!” and out came the smartphone for video and as he crossed the stage to get his degree, she whooped and yelled and hopped up and down and so did I.

More important than a college degree is the love of a good woman, and seeing this elegant funny well-spoken willowy woman in the long dress in love with him and he with her — I would’ve gone to Alaska to see it, Auckland, Tuscaloosa, Turkestan.

A circle of Ojibwe drummers beat and chanted before the procession, very thrilling after the obligatory announcement acknowledging that this had once been their land — but what mattered was the reverence of the chanting and the power of the drumming, interpret it as you will. To me it stood for the spirit of these young lives, our prayers for them, setting forth into a technological jungle, a perilous trail beset with profound confusion, fascist tides that have elected a deranged president not once but twice, and the ever-present odds of tragedy and suffering, but the drums urge us onward, onward, don’t look back. Next to that, “Pomp and Circumstance” is a tea party under a striped canopy.

Thanks to hockey-arena acoustics, the speeches were almost entirely unintelligible, not so much English as the burbling of pigeons and chittering of squirrels, with words like “journey,” “accomplishments,” “discovery,” and “curiosity,” and the whole sentences I heard might’ve been composed by an older AI-powered speechbot but it didn’t matter, the day wasn’t about the bigwigs but about us, and video cameramen circulated among the Class of 2025 and their close-ups were flashed on a big screen and people whooped and screamed when they saw their graduate.

My graduation back in medieval times had no video, we just sat and listened to the college president say he was proud of us — his intelligence was as artificial as most college presidents’. I wasn’t proud of myself; my scholastic experience was highly mediocre. I went to college in order to avoid getting a job I’d hate, such as dishwashing or parking cars. I knew what I hoped to do with my life — had known since the eighth grade — and for the most part I’ve succeeded at doing it for the past sixty years but the college degree and the career were two separate entities having little to do with each other, like granola and granite. Or vermicelli and Vermont.

In Duluth I sat through the mind-numbing reading of names and my mind drifted toward the dark side, college pals who got locked in comfortable jobs and couldn’t get out, friends who got entangled with alcohol and drugs, the tragedy of cousin Lynn who stopped at a stop sign, the sun in her eyes, and entered the highway to be crushed by a truck, Corinne who dove in the water with pockets full of rocks, the tragedy of Freddie who loved all living things and crashed into the stone wall of depression, cousin Roger who dove into deep water to impress a girl forgetting that he couldn’t swim, and then Raina cried, “Here he comes!” and there he was, approaching the stage.

He was a new man, not the Charlie I had known. Under his black gown he wore a suit and tie. He wore black shoes. His wild hair had succumbed to a barber. He’d been a camper and canoeist, an outdoorsman, and now he was a model for Nordstrom’s or a candidate for Congress. Raina rose and Charlie’s mom and aunt and uncle and me the old guy and his name was spoken and the words “Graphic Design” whatever that may mean, and we let out some wild whoops like a goal had been scored in the closing seconds and the trophy won.

A moment later she said, “Let’s go meet him” and we descended the stairs to the concourse and there he was. She flew into his arms and he held her close and there’s the story. Lord, thank you for your generosity. True love in the midst of pomposity.

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This is a great country

Fame is fleeting, especially semi-celebratedness is, as I know very well from my own experience, and that is exactly as it should be. The earth spins around the sun, the constellations pass by, tall trees fall in the forest, their trunks chewed by chipmunks, and Johnny Larson, once the emperor of late-night TV, is now a small footnote, Walter Contrite, Dave Caraway, all gone, and in my category of fame, Men of Letters, there is no such thing as true celebrity anymore, no Hemingways, no Frosts or Tennessee Williamses, just Caramel Cream, Cashew Crunch, and Cocoa Delight. I am Vanilla.

Fifty years ago a writer could set out to write about the weekly doings of a small Midwestern town, and so I did, but now you need dragons or vicious criminals or diaphanously clad ladies swanning around as described by artificial intelligence. I am a back issue.

I accept this. I embrace it. I had my day. That day is past. Now and then a woman in her late 60s leans over and says, “My dad was a fan of yours” and I thank her. But last week, while changing planes at MSP, walking from Concourse B to F for a flight to LaGuardia, I heard a flight attendant say, “Prairie Home!” and wave to me, a guy edged up at Caribou Coffee and said, “I grew up on you,” a filmmaker said he liked my work, and this little flurry made me appreciate the tremendous kindness of people, going out of their way to make an old man feel important.

The old world passes but there is always a place for kindness. I am of a generation confused by the Great Electronic Leap forward and this makes it possible for the young, even small children, to show us the way, and Lord, do they gladly step in and do it. I stand at the counter trying to figure out where to place my Visa card to make the reader beep and a skinny kid of 15 or so with wild hair and a cryptic T-shirt reaches over and helps me. This is beautiful.

“Thank you very much,” I say. He grunts. Someday he may say, “You’re very welcome.” Or maybe characters don’t say that in the fantasy graphic novels he loves, but nonetheless kindness is kindness. Instead of hostility (“Get out of the way, douchebag, and let a normal person through.”), he made it easy.

I remember after a famous fashion model died in a horrible crash, the story in the Times said, “Though she was famous as a fashion icon, she was also well-known for how deeply she cared about her friends and family.” The she was also well-known leaped out at me as perhaps the kindness of a copy editor who wanted to put a flower on the casket. It touched me. How do you testify to kindness? What evidence do you offer? You just say so. She was a great beauty and she had a good heart.

As a favor to a friend, I let myself get talked into going to his house one Saturday and hanging out with thirty of his Creative Writing students over wine and cheese. I don’t necessarily approve of Creative Writing courses, I might prefer Correct Composition, but I was 20 once myself and so I hung for five hours and it was awkward at first but I knew what I needed to do: recognize each of them as an equal and a colleague. So we didn’t talk about our previous work, we talked about what we were working on now, their ambitions, and I confessed some of my regrets and offered advice about things that didn’t exist yet, and they felt honored, and it was a kindness.

The place to witness kindness is on the streets of Manhattan. Deadly delivery bikes go racing past through red lights and every step you take you witness acts of kindness toward the old and small children and pets and if anyone should fall, or falter, or show alarm, arms will reach out. The American people are among the kindest on God’s green earth. If you think otherwise, you really need to get out more often and look around. We are a beautiful people saddled with a sleazebag president but he is fading away and soon we will see ourselves more clearly. The gentleman has lived an insulated life on golf courses and high floors of buildings and guarded limos. This is a great country. Go out and enjoy it.

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