Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 40

The secret of my success is longevity

I was a lousy student in Lyle Bradley’s 10th grade biology class, and he was wildly generous to give me a B-minus given my ineptitude at frog dissection and tree identification, and since then I’ve descended into superstition and mythology and faith in vitamin E and chicken soup and in the story of Adam and Eve in the garden, the woman created from a spare rib because the man was lonely, but had God chosen, He could’ve made the man capable of creating egg and sperm and combining the two, perhaps by sticking his finger into his ear, and we’d have a world of a billion guys and there’d be no fashion industry, no beauty products, and what little opera there would be would not be very grand.

Had I worked hard in Lyle’s class I might’ve gone on to get a degree in science from a third-rate college and started a mediocre career and who needs that? Nobody. Instead, I looked for a line of work that didn’t exist anymore and became the host of a live radio variety show, of which there were maybe four in the country, and of those four hosts I was pretty good. And this is my advice to the young: don’t be a poet or video producer or proctologist or politician — you’ll find thousands of people ahead of you in line; chose something very rare — write a Canadian romance novel, make butterfly milk, design an app to tap maple sap, produce a podcast of pure silence. Be distinctive from the get-go. Become a Mob boss. The Mob is dead, so revive it. Some things worked better when the Mob was in charge. Be the guy in charge.

Thousands of young people want to go into literature or the arts, but those fields are overcrowded. The arts aren’t about art, they’re about prizes, the Pulitzer, Booker, Hooker, Smuckers, Emmy, Sammy, Jimmy. That’s all people know about. If someone wins a prize, the name of it will be permanently attached to the recipient’s name: “Sammy-award-winning ceramicist Tammy Lanolin, etc.” It’s all about awards, nobody knows your work from anyone else’s, the prize is your Get Out Of Anonymity Free card.

A million idealistic young people aim to get into politics, which is a terrible choice.

Politics is a disaster zone. The country is permanently divided between burgeoning totalitarians and weak-kneed democrats. People love conflict, the call to arms, the smell of gunpowder, the chance to despise the despicable and maybe hang them from a lamppost and put their head on a spike.

The Scandinavians avoid this polarization by having multiple political parties, a dozen in Denmark, a half dozen in Norway, eight in Sweden, eight in Finland, which means that partisans subscribe to a specific platform, campaign on it, and then a coalition government is formed that requires extensive compromise. Campaigning is set aside in favor of governance. You settle down and try to make things work. And often you may see people who were skeptics put in charge of the very programs they were critical of. The anti-immigration candidate is put in charge of Immigration & Naturalization, the coal and gas guy becomes the administrator of solar and wind. Enough with the posturing, let’s make some progress.

This system works in a small country where people live in close contact with others who disagree with them and Socialists run into Nationalists at the bar and they amuse each other but in America the lefties headed for the coasts and the rightniks took over the interior and we stick to our own and avoid neighborhoods with the wrong lawn signs.

So I’m out of politics and have begun a new career as one of America’s few octogenarian comedians. While I can still stand up, I walk out on stage and joke about decrepitude and memory loss and flatulence and I do a little tap dance while I sing:

Dig a hole in the ground,
Three feet across and six feet down,
Borrow the dough, pass the basket,
Give the guy a high-class casket,
Kneel and close your eyes in prayer,
Thank God it’s him, not you, up there.
Line up for a last reviewal
Once the man was cold and cruel,
Now he’s sweet, quiet, calm,
That’s what happens when you embalm,
Close the lid and say goodbye,
You really ought to try to cry,
Fold up the flag, give a salute,
There goes the waste of a pretty good suit.
Everybody do the funeral rag.

I’ve got this field more or less to myself. The competition is dropping like flies. By the time I’m ninety, I’m going to be king of the hill, top of the heap, just like whatsisname sang, the guy with the toupee. My hair is natural. You young people, wait your turn.

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In Georgia, taking shelter from the storm

I am now officially done with looking down on the South, which I did for years as a good Northerner but I’ve now spent three days in the town of Carrollton, Georgia (pop. 26,738), enjoying the cheesy grits and pulled pork, collard greens and cornbread, and the waiters who when I say, “Thank you,” say, “My pleasure.” And when I pay the bill, they say, “Preciate y’all.” You don’t hear that up north. I holed up here to avoid getting stuck in the Atlanta airport during the blizzard in New York and Carrollton turns out to be a hotbed of amiability, where if you make eye contact people say, “Good morning” and maybe “How you all doing?” though there’s only one of me but all of me is doing just fine, thank you very much, and this easily leads into small talk.

I got up from breakfast at the hotel and passed a table with two couples eating breakfast and one man said, “How you all doing?” and I said, “Never better,” and I commented on the fact I’d seen a number of extremely tall young men coming into the hotel and he told me there was a college basketball tournament over at the University of Western Georgia a few blocks away. We discussed what it must be like to be six-eight or six-ten and on the court you need to be aggressive and rangy, but walking around indoors you feel constrained and you keep bumping your head and the bed is too short. One of the women said, “You see one of those giants trying to fold himself up and get into a car, it makes me grateful to be short and fat.” Up north, I all wouldn’t have been asked that question, and this small friendly exchange wouldn’t happen.

Carrollton is a comfortable place with a handsome old downtown around a square and stately churches and an arts center and the cooking at the Brown Dog café reminded me of my mother’s, but it was the ease of striking up conversation that touched my heart. I come from Minnesota, the land of stoical Scandinavians, men of few words, and if you go to a Lutheran church, the hand-shaking is highly selective and a visitor may leave unshaken and unspoken to.

Sunday I walked into the Brown Dog and passed a table and a man reached out and took my arm and stood up and said, “I got to tell you that your pants are unzipped.” I fixed the problem and thanked him and he noted my accent and one thing led to another and his wife invited me to join them for lunch so I did. He was my age, she was younger, she grew up in Chicago, and he grew up in Georgia.

I ordered ham and grits and collard greens. “Ham is a good choice,” he said. “They can’t hurt ham, no matter what they do.” She was an English teacher and he was retired, formerly in the construction business. He was the son of a sharecropper: “Worst way to earn a living that there ever was.” He picked cotton as a child. “I had to be someplace so they figured I might as well be in the field.” They sent him to the house to see what time it was and he couldn’t read a clock but he told them where the hands were pointing. The family ate squirrel and rabbit with grits and gravy. His best friend was a boy so black they called him Blue. “We’d go to a café for a Coke and he had to go in the back door if they’d let him in at all. I knew it wasn’t right.” He was ten when his family moved to California, his dad got a regular job, and they got a house with indoor plumbing.

I’d known him for all of forty-five minutes and I got a whole story, which goes to show that in the right town, which Carrollton is, it may be worthwhile to let your pants be unzipped. “You can’t erase history,” he said, “but we are all brothers under the skin,” and I certainly felt brotherly toward him and the others I had met, even the seven-footers. And I am done looking down on the South. We have our history up north too and it’s not all shiny. And I do believe in the beauty of small talk. Thanks for reading this, I do appreciate you, all of you.

 

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Here are your instructions. Go. Do it.

I was in college when I first saw a moving sidewalk and the ingenuity of this machine in speeding up us pedestrians in an airport was a revelation to me and I realized that the great advances would not come from us writers but from engineers and this has turned out to be true judging from the gigantic telescope they’ve put a million miles out in space to study the origins of the universe and perhaps visit God, meanwhile we writers are cooking up the same old meatloaf and mashed potatoes except we’re putting garlic in it. Engineers are changing the world.

Change is a powerful tonic. My Uber driver has a GPS device with a woman’s voice telling him precisely how to take me to JFK to catch a flight. Years ago, the old cabbies Gus and Butch and Spike were proud of their knowledge of the city and now the GPS device opens up the game to newcomers, immigrants, Muhammad and Rafael and Aisha and Eliana. It’s an amazing invention, the inflexion of the woman’s voice is so natural, not robotic. If engineers can develop a device programmed to navigate the streets of New York, then surely they can create a reliable electronic lawyer, and when they do, we’re on the way to reducing the cost of government by 50 or 75 percent. If programmers can’t design a more capable U.S. senator than Ted Cruz, then my name is Kyrsten Sinema.

Change is a tonic and we need it desperately in this country, which has become all too set in concrete. The U.S. Senate is a very ornate 19th-century chamber where not much happens and so it’s practically empty most of the time. A senator will stand up and address a roomful of unoccupied desks, arguing for or against the filibuster, which is as archaic as the dial telephone or tuberculosis, and meanwhile the Royalist party is attempting to suppress voting, which has become too popular in the wrong places, and the suppression is happening in broad daylight, just like the guy I saw years ago on West 90th Street in Manhattan, busting a car window with a broom handle and reaching in to steal the radio, and I said, “What are you doing??” and he said, “None of your business.”

Well, it is our business, even if it’s not my car, and voter suppression is nasty mischief carried out by nabobs and bozos who feel they own the franchise, and I say, Let’s shake things up so these yahoos don’t feel too secure. It’s time to call a new Constitutional Convention. The previous one was held in a nation of fewer than four million persons and now we’re around 330 million, time to go back to the drawing board.

This convention will be populist, representing population, not territory, and its purpose will be to clear out some outmoded bric-a-brac and pack it off to the attic, and we’ll start with the Senate, an elitist body based on the assumption that each state sends its brightest minds to act as a control on the popular whims of the House, but when you look at the membership closely, the assumption falls apart.

If the new Constitution provides mandatory retirement at 62, the quality of the Senate immediately jumps from lackluster to promising, and if we reduce the Senate from 100 to 80 by consolidating states—unite the Dakotas and Carolinas, make Nevada and Utah into Nevuta, Washington and Idaho into Wahoo, Vermont and New Hampshire into Montshire, Texas and Oklahoma into Tokses, Iowa and Missouri into Missiowa, and grant Hawaii and Alaska their independence, and if we use electronic lawyers in government agencies and reduce America’s 3,243 counties to, say, 1,843, we’ll reduce the cost of government dramatically and use some of the savings to expand the Supreme Court to 27, a body that represents the diversity of America rather than a committee of the Federalist Society.

We need more women in power like the GPS woman. I know this from personal experience. I walk into the living room, having read the paper and thought about the news from eastern Europe and I have an interesting opinion about it, and my wife looks at me and says, “You’re spilling your coffee.” And I go to get a paper towel and she says, “Let me do it” and she mops it up because she wants it done right. Men have been spilling coffee more or less constantly the past ten years and we need a change. Don’t argue with me. Just do it and you’ll see I’m right.

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The future of escapism as I see it

I was in Las Vegas last Saturday, walking down the street at 7 a.m., looking for a breakfast joint, a bitter cold wind blowing past the neon avenues of casinos, and finally, feeling I was on the road to perdition, I walked into the Golden Nugget and was directed by a security guy past several acres of flashing dinging slot machines to a café back in the corner and there, among flashing lights and dinging, I ordered a garden omelet with a side of hash browns and coffee, and struck up a conversation with my neighbor, a guy from Long Beach who said he’d been to a burlesque show the night before and found it rather ho-hum. The women were big and manly and the comedian was “very gay” and mostly made jokes about his mother and the whole thing was less bawdy than your average post office mural. I looked over his shoulder at the few men playing the slots, a pitiful lot, men who looked like they’d been ditched by girlfriends and couldn’t remember where their car was parked, and it struck me as sad that a city designed for escapism should be so forlorn.

I was in Las Vegas to give a talk about growing up in the Fifties in a small town in Minnesota, the culture my generation strove mightily to escape, the righteous, abstemious, suspicious culture of our hardworking Depression-era parents. We took up the Beach Boys and Beat poetry and long hair and the Grateful Dead to get ourselves out of that Midwestern framework. We were named Gary and Bob and Sharon and Karen and we gave our children literary names like Emma and Annabella and Oliver and Noah and now, in old age, we find ourselves oppressed by our progressive offspring who hold us responsible for racism, poverty, the theft of Indian lands, and who police our language and expect us to honor them as survivors of our abusive parenting. Nuts to that. We’re out of here, kids. Bye. See you around.

The Las Vegas we need isn’t about gambling, it’s a town where we can feel hip. Wear bell-bottoms and tie-dye and sandals and listen to tribute bands do the Doors, the Stones, the Dead, and maybe comics doing scatological jokes and skinny people doing nude scenes from “Hair” and we’ll maybe play Scrabble for money and feast on food that’s bad for us and — here’s the big draw — an open stage where we can read our writing to an audience of other writers waiting to read theirs.

This is true escapism, to feel you’re an artist, like me in Vegas talking about my hometown. At home, I’m forever reminded of my limitations. I don’t know about plumbing or electricity or even replacing the ink cartridge in the printer. My wife loves me dearly but after I load the dishwasher, she rearranges things. She makes the coffee because I make it too strong. I once made our bed and she had to remake it because the corners weren’t tight. But in Las Vegas, I walked out on a stage and people applauded and I was the center of attention for ninety minutes. It was beautiful. This is the ultimate escapism.

The new Las Vegas should be in Minnesota, a state of polite people who take each other seriously and avoid harsh judgments. The Strip will be Lake Street, and instead of casinos, coffeehouses where you can sing your songs, read poetry, or display your photography, and people will admire it. You’re a retired English teacher, and now you can walk out on stage, nod to the piano player and sing “Ripple” and “Wild Horses” and be appreciated. Your children scorn you, but here you are in the spotlight, smiling faces turned up toward you, and you pull out a Lucky and light it just like Frank used to do, and you sing “My Way” and it’s beautiful.

Lake Street extends for a couple miles. Dozens of empty storefronts wait for redevelopment. In five years, this could be a cultural mecca for elderly persons like me who are looking for self-vindication. You go back to New York or L.A., people ask where you went, you say, “I had an exhibit of my water colors and I did a reading of my poems and sang three nights in a club.” They say, “I didn’t know you were a performer.” Well, now they do. In L.A., you’re just an old CPA, but you were very big in Minneapolis. Very big.

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She loves me enough so I live in New York

I’m a Minnesotan and I live in New York because my wife is in love with me and she loves New York. It is exactly that simple. She loves opera and fine art and interesting foods and observing human eccentricity and you don’t find much of that out in the Corn Belt.

I don’t belong here. People hear me talk and can tell I’m an outsider because I pronounce it “tock” whereas they say “towalk” and also because I say, “After you, please, go right ahead, I’m in no hurry” and New Yorkers say, “Watcher back!” and at a dinner party New Yorkers all talk over each other, conversations are multilayered, and I, who was brought up to wait my turn, sit silently for three hours and the other guests go home wondering, “Who was the weird guy? Obviously a non-English speaker.”

New Yorkers exercise freedom of speech; I don’t. The other night, at a French restaurant, I ordered cassoulet and paid $24 for a bowl of beans with chunks of pork, rather inferior to the casserole Mabel served to the kids in the grade school cafeteria for which I paid 35 cents at the time. My dinner companions asked, “How is it?” and I said, “Excellent,” because I was brought up not to complain. Maybe in another ten years I’ll call the waiter over and say, “Take this back to the kitchen and take it off my bill.” I will be 89, an age at which one should be able to speak one’s mind.

But I’m okay being out of place. My dad once said, “You couldn’t pay me enough to live in New York,” and as a postal clerk, he was probably right about that, but love makes the difference.

I admire New Yorkers. I went to the Bronx to see the Minnesota Twins get crushed by the Yanks and on the D train up to the ballpark, packed in tight with people avoiding contact despite being less than six inches apart, the train sways and a Black woman’s elbow bumps my chest and I observe the tattoos on her neck and feel a sense of solidarity: not a word is spoken. A Minnesotan would hesitate to mention her race for fear of being considered racist but I did and it is what it is and if you don’t like it, sue me.

It’s astonishing that the city works as well as it does. We hail a cab and go to the Met and for less than we’d pay for a flight to Des Moines, we see a great performance of “Rigoletto,” which, for me, is more memorable than a night in Des Moines could be, and Rigoletto is a great baritone role, and as a baritone I appreciate that, and the assassin is played by a basso who sings the longest lowest note in opera and the audience goes wild, very rare that subterranean singing evokes such enthusiasm. It’s a great evening and we exit, thrilled, into the chilly night and wave down a cab and are transported jiggety-jig back home. COVID is raging around us, but we wore our masks through the show, and we’re feeling fine.

There’s a crisis in New York every day, sometimes three or four. Some water mains go back to Victorian times and a pipe bursts or lightning strikes and the power goes out or giant rats come up out of a toilet, but New Yorkers learn to endure. You lose power and you light candles, a water main bursts and your faucet goes dry so you get along on gin for a day or two. A good dog should be able to occupy an attacking rat until you can grab a hair dryer and scare the rodent away, unless the power is out in which case you whack it with a leaf from the dining room table, but if there’s no water, even more rats may come up out of the toilet, and you’ll have to reach for the acetylene torch you keep under the bed and take on the whole herd. New Yorkers live with the anticipation of crisis, and when a day goes by without one, it feels luxurious.

And that’s how I feel at this very moment. No rats, water comes out of the tap, lights are on, my love lies in bed beside me. She reaches over and takes my hand. This is a very good day.

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My mother told me and now I’ll tell you

January is a peaceful month, too cold to go anywhere so I sit in my spacious chair with a quilt around me, still in my pajamas at two in the afternoon, eating guacamole with tortilla chips and contributing nothing whatsoever to civilization or to the GNP, except for the occasional limerick.

January is good for the soul,
Down in my warm rabbit hole.
In a pillowy bed
From toes to head
I keep myself under control.

Christmas is gone and the illusion that childhood innocence can be recovered (it can’t) and we’re free of obligatory joyfulness and able to savor sadness again and relish our loneliness in this uncaring world, and the meals are penitential meals because my pants got too tight and my shirt wouldn’t button at the neck, so it’s time for celery and Ry-Krisp and herbal tea, which give a sweet sense of righteousness, which is good for vanity, feeling that the jowl is shrinking and lard that hangs over the belt is gradually coming under control and this — dare I mention it? — leads to inclinations of an erotic nature, something that disgusts you children, the thought that an old coot and his lady would commingle skin to skin and whisper and sigh and moan and even shriek for joy, but this is why we’re grateful when the Christmas guests go home and we needn’t stifle our pleasures.

February’s in view,
Two valentines, me and you,
Lie down for a nap
And whisper and wrap
Ourselves in each other
And kiss and O brother,
It’s thrilling and utterly new.

Winter is the most beautiful time of year, if it’s beauty you want, trees and bushes on the morning after a blizzard, the entire world brilliant with snow, and if the sun shines, it is a transformative experience, if that’s what you wish, but of course if you want parking lots and taco joints and concrete condos and boredom, then Florida is for you.

The world is lightening up but these long dark evenings are a lovely time of day, especially for those of us who had industriousness baked into us in childhood, but when the sun sets at five p.m., the old drudge sets the manuscript aside and lights a candle and the lady pours a glass of wine and it’s time for conversation, which is at the heart of a good marriage and a kid brought up evangelical, believing that God is paying close attention to every word that comes out of your mouth, writing it down, giving you D-minuses, carries a terrible disability, but I am trying, I am trying.

I stay indoors in January out of fear I’ll forget what my mother told me as a small child — Do not, under any circumstance, even if someone dares you, do not, do not, do not put your tongue on an iron pump handle or railing.

If you do, your tongue will freeze to the metal and you will be trapped and you may spend the night there, tongue frozen to iron, and they will find your body in the morning, and your grieving family will ask, “Why? Why us?” to which there is no answer.

And now I regret mentioning this. For having warned you of the danger, I’ve planted the idea of handle-tonguing in your mind and you may reject my advice and say (1) it’s my tongue and I’ll do what I want with it, or (2) it’s no worse than having a cold, or (3) if it’s God’s will that I lick a pump handle, then I will, or (4) I read on Twitter that some doctors say that handle-licking may be beneficial, and tomorrow when you go out and see a pump handle or iron railing you’ll be unable to stop yourself from walking up to it and — so forget what I said. Erase it from your mind. Stop reading. Find something else to do. Snort some methamphetamine, toss back a pint of bourbon, smoke reefer — there are treatment programs for those bad habits, but there is no AA program for Arctic Adherence. No. The answer is to stay indoors. But if you must leave the house, be sure to wear a mask over your nose and mouth, but not a paper or cloth mask, you need an iron mask, one with a lock. Your breath will warm it and keep you safe. Leave the key at home.

Garrison Keillor © 01.18.22

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A beautiful afternoon is good for the heart

Dire warnings of crowded ERs in New York, a fresh plague of COVID is raging in the streets, but a person can’t live in a closet and on Saturday we went to the opera against our better judgment and it was an excellent thing to do. The Met is back in business and a lady walked out on stage to remind us to keep our masks on and people applauded — we feared she’d announce the show was canceled, but no, Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro went on with a heroic cast, Italian, Czech, English, American, some singers who maybe hadn’t been on a stage for a year or more, and all told it was pretty fabulous. Mozart wrote it two years before our Constitution was ratified and people are still laughing at the jokes. The Constitution is a work in progress but Figaro is a masterpiece.

Performing arts companies all over are striving to be politically proper these days, and practice inclusivity and diversity, and here’s a comedy with servants in it and romantic shenanigans and all is resolved in the end with a sweet chorus along the lines of “Let’s forgive each other and all be happy,” especially sweet since in 1786 when Mozart wrote it diseases were raging for which there were no vaccines and people languished in debtors’ prisons and small children worked in factories and people felt lucky to live to be 40. Mozart died at 35 from an infection treated today by antibiotics. And the piece is gorgeous and funny as can be. I sat next to my wife who once played violin on an opera tour of forty consecutive Figaros and she laughed through it all.

The Count is arranging a tryst with Susanna and the Countess sings the gorgeous lament of the betrayed wife, “Dove sono i bei momenti” (Where have those beautiful moments gone of sweetness and pleasure and why, despite his lying tongue, do the happy memories not fade?), a moment of sheer transcendent heartbreaking beauty and then you’re back to the slapstick, the baritone’s lust for the soprano, people hiding behind curtains, the seductive note, the wife plotting revenge.

With COVID going on, the Met is working like crazy to stay in business. A singer tests positive and a sub has to be ready in the wings and new rehearsals scheduled to work him or her into the complexity of the staging, and this happens over and over, and the sub cannot be Peggy Sue from Waterloo, the sub must be a pro and a principal who is up to par, and so singers have been brought in to cover the crucial roles, and a soprano might cover the Countess in Figaro and Musetta in La Bohème, two major roles and she must be prepared — in the event the lead tests positive for COVID — to go onstage tonight in one opera or tomorrow night in the other, two demanding roles in her head and a sheaf of stage directions, and maybe she’s living out of a suitcase in lockdown, and staying away from unmasked strangers, meanwhile the Met is playing to half-empty houses due to fears of the virus, and this is not a small matter. The Metropolitan Opera is the standard-bearer of the art form in America. If it goes under, something fabulous and thrilling is lost in our country. There is a battle going on; it’s a story you could write an opera about.

If you consider opera elitist, then I guess passionate feeling is elitist and we should all be content to be cool and lead a life of Whatever. Pop music is cool, but opera is out to break your heart. I saw William Bolcom’s A View From The Bridge a couple years ago and I’m still a mess. Renée Fleming did the same to me in Der Rosenkavalier.

I am no student of opera, only a tourist, and I’m from the Midwest, the home of emotional withdrawal, where I grew up among serious Bible scholars for whom the result of scholarship was schism and bitterness, and now I go to a church where I am often overwhelmed by the hymns, the prayers for healing, the exchange of peace, a church full of Piskers but sometimes the sanctuary is so joyful and we stand for the benediction and, as Mozart wrote, let us forgive each other and go and be happy, and let us also, for God’s sake, get vaccinated. Do it for the sake of the soprano’s children so she can come out and break your heart.

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A man walking through a big city snowstorm

A beautiful snow fell in Manhattan on Epiphany, the feast of light, and the city was cheerful that morning and my cabdriver said out of the blue, “It’s a beautiful day and we’re here and that’s what matters,” which is extraordinary coming from a cabdriver, an epiphany. I worry about cabdrivers in the Uber age. I hear him talking top-speed in a Slavic tongue and wonder how much he’s invested in this cab and can he earn it back by picking up people hailing him on street corners. I doubt it.

I am an American, born and bred, and as such am romantic about the little entrepreneur, the corner grocer, the stationery store around the corner, the independent druggist, but Amazon is ever at your fingertips and if you type a word beginning with the letters A-M its central computer the size of Detroit trembles with amatory anticipation or if someone in the room says, “I wonder where we could find —” it is picked up by the company’s satellites circling the globe that send out transactional vibrations and before long the website is on your screen and it reads your unconscious and without your checking a single box, $1345.34 worth of merchandise is due to arrive on your doorstep tomorrow by 8 a.m.

That’s what made me love it years ago, the sheer ease of shopping there, no need for a password — Amazon knows me!! — it knows my weakness for Pearson’s Salted Nut Rolls and ginger tea and medical romance novels and it makes shopping so easy that I cannot not do it — but now I look around the neighborhood and see For Rent signs on storefronts and I read about the death toll caused by lack of exercise due to online shopping and hear about the working conditions in the slave labor camps and realize that in a few years, Jeff Bezos will hold enough U.S. federal bonds to have a voice in naming the next Secretary of the Treasury and why should the Federalist Society own the Supreme Court? Why shouldn’t Amazon have a seat?

Amazon is its own nation within the U.S. and is making ours a retail economy and soon American manufacturing will be limited to frozen pizza, plastics, and personal memoirs, and one day Premier Xi Jinping will FaceTime Joe from Beijing and say, “Ahem. You want to tell us how to run Hong Kong, fine, but we embargo clothing.” And the prospect of Americans huddled in blankets is not a happy one. Our lust for Chinese-made clothing, cellphones, computers, and cars will settle the matter. We cannot live without them and they can very well live without Pearson’s Salted Nut Rolls and personal memoirs by pitiful persons in Pittsburgh, Paterson, and Petaluma. End of story.

I walked around looking at the snow and noticed people flocking to the hardware store to buy plastic sliders and tiny toboggans. Amazon sells this stuff but not instantly and a snowstorm is urgently exciting because snow doesn’t last long in New York, it turns to slush in a day or two, and little kids on their way home from school are trembling to get out in the park and slide. Little kids growing up in tiny apartments where a parent or two are working from home, consultants working by Zoom, novelists, psychiatrists doing phone therapy, unemployed theater critics, theologians on sabbatical, copywriters, content providers, whatever, and no whooping or shrieking is allowed, the poor children’s spirits are stifled by TV and Twitter, but then it snows and they dash into the great outdoors, a slider in hand, and in their excitement they forget their cellphones at home, and now they are reliving my Minnesota childhood on the slopes of Central Park, whooping, crashing around, throwing snowballs, deliriously free as children need to discover how to be.

We’re in the midst of a revolt by superstition against science, which is dragging the pandemic on for a while, and the cynical fiction of the stolen election is another downer, but those lunacies seem more feverish in the tepid states. A good hard winter is a restorative. You entertain paranoid delusions but then you realize that if you slip and fall and bang your head and lie helpless in the cold, someone will come to rescue you and won’t ask your political leaning. A good snowfall for Epiphany is a big boost. Speak the truth and the truth shall set you free. In the other direction is a place you do not want to go.

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Why Washington needs more snowstorms

It’s always satisfying to see our nation’s capital hit by a good hard snowstorm and imagine powerful men trying to shovel their way out of a snowbank. It’s a parable right out of Scripture, Let the powerful have a sense of humor for each in turn shall be made helpless.

It was front-page in the papers and the subhead said that a U.S. senator had been stranded overnight on the interstate. The blockage of an interstate is the true measure of a serious storm and the headline writer tossed in the senator as further evidence, but it only made me wish there had been numerous senators — say, those from Florida, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, the five states least accomplished at snow motorism, and if the Senate had come to session the next morning, our nation would get moving again, one blockage breaking a logjam. But it was only a Democrat from Virginia, giving Mitch McConnell a one-vote edge, and there is no vacancy on the Supreme Court, so he didn’t need it.

But I have no right to be smug about Washington, you’re right. My wife took away my car keys a couple years ago when I mentioned casually while driving that I have double vision and so my old Minnesota highway skills have atrophied. I sit in the shotgun seat and am astonished at her adeptness in traffic, her unhesitant merging, her acceleration upon seeing the light turn yellow, her masterful (or mistressful) parallel parking. When I met her, she was 35, living in Manhattan, hadn’t ever owned a car, and maybe she married me for transportation and now I admire her driving. She is a whiz: her training as a violinist, paying close attention to the score while also watching an untrustworthy conductor and listening to your section, has served her well as a motorist. Plus, she swears better than I ever could. Growing up evangelical, I swear like a kindergarten teacher. And “gosh” is not useful in reacting to treacherous stupidity, not in the Senate, not on the road.

We’ve spent the pandemic mostly in New York where a car is not the necessity it was back on the farm in Freeport, Minnesota, where I had a long narrow driveway to navigate at 5 a.m. when I left for work at the radio station, and after a heavy snowfall, I felt like Admiral Peary in search of the North Pole. Now, in New York, retired, snow rarely encountered, nothing to do but make coffee and glance at the paper, I’ve been reduced from admiral to a deckhand, and I’m okay with that. I feel no diminution of my manhood whatsoever.

On second thought, I do miss the sense of superiority, cruising through a blizzard along Highway 12, seeing a car in the ditch, and the absolute superiority when I stopped to help a ditched driver with his thumb out. Jesus left that out of the Good Samaritan story, the unseemly pleasure of assisting the helpless. The poor shivering man climbed into my big warm car and — remember, this was before cellphones — I drove him to the next town where he could call for a tow truck, and the gratitude of the poor wretch was satisfying to me, the Man Who Knows How To Drive On Snow, and once a wretch offered me cash, he was a city fellow, unaccustomed to Christian charity, and I said, “No, no, no. My pleasure.” Which it was. A rather smug pleasure.

It’s hard to combat smugness, you just have to grow out of it. I’m at a point in life when people my age are going into assisted living, memory units, the nuthouse, loony bin, call it what you like. As for me, I’m fine. I have a very close relationship with my cardiologist. When you’ve gotten a defibrillator installed in your chest by another man, it’s more than a casual friendship. The other day, he called in a medical technician to make an adjustment to the device and a tall child who appeared to be about fifteen walked in with an iPad and started tapping on the Pad. It is a sobering experience to have a teenager tinkering with your heart on an iPad as if I were a video game. One mistake and the defibrillator might defunctionalize me. What made it worse was his black T-shirt. I assumed health care people wear white or pale blue.

A boy with a plaything held my life in his hands. There is no smugness after this. I’m living on the edge. It’s not the end of the world but I can see it from here. Another three hundred serious snowstorms and the Senate might discuss climate matters.

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Meditation while waiting for coffee to brew

I was in Clearwater Beach, Florida, the morning of the 31st, listening to coffee drip, looking out the picture window at a parking lot, and saw a squirrel sitting on top of a telephone pole at eye level fifteen feet away, looking at me. On the beach, men with metal detectors searched for lost diamond rings and gold ingots. The squirrel had no good reason to be on top of a pole and I had no reason to be in Florida and the men on the beach kept moving along and not finding anything, we were all just spending time, and eventually the squirrel went racing along a cable to a nearby roof and I flew back home and I assume the men found something else to do, maybe watch football and drink Harvey Wallbangers.

Time flies by, the planet is spinning faster, it’s 11 a.m. and then suddenly it’s 3:30, so I try to eliminate wasted time such as the hours I spend rustling around for postage stamps and meanwhile getting engrossed in a stack of rejection letters from editors, time that if I saved it I could spend it on nobler things, such as writing less about myself and more about social responsibility. But first I have to clean out my email box, which is laden every morning with notes like “The reason I’m running for county attorney in Rome, Georgia is …” and I, who don’t live anywhere near Georgia nor do I wish to, must unsubscribe from that mailing list, which requires four separate steps and in the time it takes to do it, I see that four more fundraising emails have appeared, all written by programmers and sent to hundreds of thousands on mailing lists bought by campaigns and it’s like being attacked by a cloud of deerflies.

I hate wasting time, now that people my age are dying like flies. I DESPISE French cuffs, the trouble of locating cufflinks and dinking around trying to finagle them into four tiny apertures in the cuffs. I prefer black T-shirts.

I hate wasting time. (Did I already say this?) And I am avoiding certain people who tend to interrupt a conversation with learned monologues and if I were to mention the usefulness of Play-Doh in making temporary repairs around the house, they might offer a lecture on Plato and his influence on Christianity by way of Augustine and while this is impressive, it kills the conversation dead.

I have a few loquacious friends among my many monosyllabic ones and I know their phone numbers and sometimes I let their calls go to voice mail where they can talk to the machine if they like. I am also avoiding people who are prone to dragging into the conversation Him Whose Name Shall Not Be Mentioned Here, whom they have been abhorring for years now, which is their perfect right, of course, but torrents of abhorrence don’t make for a pleasant evening among friends.

My mother took time-saving shortcuts. In her late eighties, she stopped ironing handkerchiefs and sheets and pillowcases. “You’re asleep when you lie in them,” she explained, “so what’s wrong with wrinkles?” Instead of whomping up big dinners, she ordered appetizer trays from the deli. Good enough.

Some time wastage is unavoidable, such as unintentional nondimensional dementia in which physical objects float through space and the screwdriver you had in the kitchen winds up in your sock drawer and your grilled cheese sandwich departs the microwave and goes into a bookshelf atop a dictionary, but this is how I get my daily exercise, walking from room to room tracking things down.

And now irony strikes: you’ve wasted five or six minutes reading my complaints and what usefulness does this offer to you, dear reader? None. Those minutes are gone, never to return, precious time you might’ve spent thinking about the pandemic or the man with the hair. So let me fill this remaining minute with a helpful suggestion or two.

1. You can save time you’d spend looking for things by renouncing materialism.

2. Pens, paper, postage, meds, matches, Kleenex, car keys, datebook, deodorant, Band-Aids, billfold, keep them in the vegetable drawer of the fridge.

3. Don’t go to Florida and if you live in Florida, leave as soon as possible. It is a state whose major industry is time demolition. Move to the far north where you’ll be busy maintaining life. Survival is its own reason for existence. Nobility can come later.

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