Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 40

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I’m done with regret, thinking about a bagel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Why I’m not running for anything whatsoever

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The little-known benefits of raw oysters perhaps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Valentine’s Day: a reminder to men

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Valentine’s day: a reminder to men

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Thoughts about toothpaste and patriotism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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