Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 41

Forget auld acquaintance, forge onward

New Year’s Day is an occasion nobody knows what to do with and so is the Eve that precedes it. I used to go to parties where we gathered around someone with a guitar and sang about broken romance and drank until the liquor was gone and the next day I awoke in a fog to watch football with other inert men but I gave all that up long ago. Gradually, a person edits out stuff that makes no sense and I scratched football, Florida vacations, artichokes, science fiction, pocket billiards, and broadcast journalism, and thus life became more and more interesting. It’s been forty years since I watched a football game. Twenty since I put the bottle away. These changes make one hopeful for the future. And here we are, looking around at 2022.

Call me naïve but I’ve been around for three score and ten plus nine years and I believe in progress. I was impressed when science found a way to put shampoo and conditioner into one bottle and when the cranberry and raisin married to form the craisin. I still rejoice at the ease of long-distance phone calls — we don’t even use the term “long distance” anymore — I’m astonished when my daughter FaceTimes me from London as I sit in a café in New York, and in our capitalist society, why does this not cost $35.75 a minute? A miracle.

I read about Boyan Slat, the young Dutchman who invented a boom that collects tons of plastic pollutants for recycling, pollutants that rivers dump into the seas and that kill fish, and it gives a person hope that we will work out the problems that a great many writers revel in despairing over, the fashionable dystopian soothsayers who prevail in academia and the media and who congregate on the coasts and talk to themselves about their iconic migraines and the systemic emptiness of life in Middle America, which they seldom set foot in but where their books sell by the truckload to comfortable people in need of the thrill of crisis.

I’ve known some luminous people in my time, and what distinguished them was their enduring enthusiasm and hopes and aspirations, and I recommend the same to you. When I was your age, I learned the arts of sarcasm and ridicule, and as a young writer aimed for a dark neurotic brilliance (“Devastating … compelling” — NY Times, “Rips the covers off the myth of exceptionalism” — Vanity Fair), but as an old man I look around and see splendor and bravery and genius and kindness and that, my dears, is the real story.

Sitting in a café on Columbus Avenue in New York a couple weeks ago, I watched an ancient man inching his way along the sidewalk, long white hair and beard, blinded by the sun, confused, tattered, about to step into the bike lane and be run down, when two young women and a young man came to his rescue, took his hand, got his address, called an Uber to come get him, put some money in his hand, and off he went. This is the real story, a man of my generation rescued by the young. Writers can revel in despair but other people are intent on solving problems, and that’s where you should put your money.

I know something about misery, having just spent four days in Florida, a state where nobody wears a mask and so I had visions of dying of COVID amid the junk food outlets and collapsible condos, but I did not die and came back north and now I have hope for 2022. The developer ex-president will find himself being questioned under oath this year, the dark cloud of perjury over his head, and his anti-science cult followers will be playing a bad hand in the November elections. Solar energy will take great strides forward. Baseball will return. My friend Harry Reid who grew up dirt-poor and fought his father to protect his mother and hitchhiked forty miles to go to high school and who wound up marshaling the Affordable Care Act through the U.S. Senate had a luminous faith in this country. I talked to him a couple months before he died last week and he was full of life and quoting Mark Twain — the line about the man who lives fully does not fear death and also, “I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” Harry was the only politician I knew who kept a picture of a humorist on his office wall. May he rest in peace and rise in glory.

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Serenity at 70, Gaiety at 80 preview

PROLOGUE

The year passes and the old man with the scythe
Is mowing closer. He hasn’t been subtle, has he.
Every day a few more people say goodbye,
Which makes me want to be light-hearted, jazzy,
Put out the hors d’oeuvres and the champagne,
Sing God Bless America, You Are My Sunshine,
In My Life, Amazing Grace, Purple Rain,
I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight, and Auld Lang Syne.
We’ve mourned for our dead and been sorry a
Long enough time. Now I take your hand, your
Eyes alight, and let us sing an aria
To love and beauty and youth and grandeur.
May the new year bring us before it has flown
What we would have wished for had we only known.
—G.K.

 

PREFACE

My life is so good at 79 I wonder why I waited this long to get here, so much of what I know would’ve been useful in my forties. Yes, there’s loneliness and pain, despair, guilt, a sense of meaninglessness, the feeling of Why am I here? What did I come in the kitchen for? A fork? A glass of water? A Pearson’s Salted Nut Roll?—welcome to the club—but on the other hand I’m not on a tight schedule or under close supervision so I have freedom to look around and think for myself. I look at the front page of the paper and think, “Not My Problem.” The world belongs to the young, I am only a tourist, and I love being a foreigner in America. I wake up early and plant my bare feet on the floor and slip away quietly so as not to awaken the gentle sleeper next to me. I turn the coffeemaker on and do a few neck flexes and get in the shower and recite the Doxology or the 87 counties of Minnesota in alphabetical order (Aitkin, Anoka, Becker, Beltrami, Benton, Big Stone, Blue Earth, Brown, Carlton, Carver, Cass, Chippewa, Chisago, Clay, Clearwater, Cook, Cottonwood, Crow Wing, etc.) to rev up the brain and put on a black T, jeans, red sneakers, walk to the kitchen, pretending I’m on a tightrope, and take the medications that promise to thin the blood and stifle brain seizures and I drink a cup of coffee and sit down at the table and feel grateful for the day to come. Life is good as your future diminishes; the scarcity makes your days more delicious. Instead of nostalgia, I feel the love of right now, this minute, 6:15 a.m. on my cellphone, so it’s precisely that, except in saying so I’ve made it 6:16.

Either I’m in Minneapolis, looking out at St. Mark’s and Loring Park where I walked at 18, on break from my job in a scullery, practicing smoking Pall Malls, intending to go to the U and become a writer, or I’m in Manhattan, looking at rooftops of brownstones on the West Side, three blocks from the restaurant where I met my wife in 1992, the younger sister of my younger sister’s classmate Elsa, a three-hour lunch. Some mornings are bleary but nothing like back in my drinking days, 20 years ago. At 79, there is no time for a big grievous slump like when I was striving to be brilliant. Life is passing. Get to work. You’ve been doing this all your life, you know the drill. Shut the computer, get out paper and pen. You write and as you do, you cut, you scratch and replace, the garden grows by pruning. You hear the solid phrase as you write, and if you make four pages of scratches and scribble and get eight solid lines, it’s a good start. Three hours later, Jenny appears. She sits on my lap, silently, my hand on her back. We are perfectly still for a minute. She pours a cup of coffee, lightens it with milk, looks at me. She says, “Good morning. How are you?” and I say, “Never better” and it’s the honest truth, now that she’s here.

I was a big shot once and journalists wanted to interview me which was fun but nobody is that interesting for long and it’s a comfort to become a tourist in old age, a sort of weightlessness, and enjoy my irrelevance. People resist vaccination mandates as the rate of infection increases: Not My Problem. Freighters wait to unload at ports, docks are piled with containers, supplies are running low, building projects are delayed: NMP. The local opera company, while doing Don Giovanni and Carmen this season pledges to challenge patterns of discrimination and privilege and exercise its moral imperative in behalf of inclusivity and diversity and bring about a sense of authentic belonging in opposition to systems of oppression and colonialism and suspicion of otherness, to which I say, “Goody goody gumdrops” though it is NMP. I’m no longer from here.

We reach old age through sheer good luck. We have the benefit of drugs unavailable to our grandparents and things surgeons do to your heart or hip or knee, we avoided drowning, close calls on the highway turned out in our favor, we didn’t fall in with people whose hobby was opiates, we had mothers who told us to look both ways and we did. My cousin Roger drowned at 17 and dear friend Corinne at 43 and I think of them often, the tall kid with the flattop and the crooked grin, the serious economist who could be jollied into sitting at the piano and walloping out “On The Road To Mandalay,” and I pick up my feet and march forward. The first step to a good old age is gratitude.

As little kids, we all did hilarious imitations of elderly dither, the shaky hand, the quavery creaky voice (“Where is my Geritol?”), the stooped back and hesitant step, the forgetfulness and spooky dementia, and now here we are, the butt of our own joke. Perfect justice. What happened? We lost a stride, our vision blurred slightly, we hesitated at the stairway, someone asked, “Are you okay?” We said, “What? Sorry?” and an invisible sign ELDERLY was hung around our neck and people start going out of their way to be kind to us who never had bothered to before. I used to hold the door for women and now they hold the door for me and point out a treacherous curb and incline. I resent this. They are nice Christian women doing as Our Lord commanded, assisting the pitiful, but I’m not pitiful (yet) so please take your helping hand and help someone else. People say, “You’re certainly looking natty,” and I have to google the word, I never heard it before, it means, “decrepit but nonetheless presentable.”

Matters go downhill fast. A stranger looks at you and speaks RATHER LOUDLY AND OVER-ENUNCIATES and you want to poke him in the snoot. You board the bus and a woman gets up and offers her seat. You don’t want her goddamn seat, you’re quite capable of standing on your own two feet, but to your surprise, you say “Thank you” and sit down. And that’s when you turn the corner. I’m old. My wife says, “It’s a nice walk, about six miles, what do you say?” and just then I see a taxi and wave and he pulls over and we get in. No more need be said.

I realized I was old when I no longer knew who famous people are anymore—the celebs at the Tonys and Emmys and Grammys and Timmys and Ronnies—Ann Bleecker and Christopher Delaney and Eldridge Fulton and Leonard Mercer—who are these smarmy narcissists with hair piled on their heads and weird eyeglasses? My famous people had mostly died and gone to Halls of Fame. This made me sad and then I realized how liberating it was to know that Madison Mercer’s drug troubles and Prince Rector’s arrest for DWI and Warren York’s wife Sheridan Vandam’s allegations of abuse are no concern of mine whatsoever. I’m free to stop reading about them.

Once I knew about stuff and took a cool ironic view of pop culture and celebrity and now I’m completely out of touch. I’m off the grid, like the Amish, and I feel lighter for it. I’ve put away the clock and now I enjoy the time.

When John Updike and Philip Roth, the deans of American fiction, died, it dawned on me that my time was past. The tables at the bookstore were full of novels by other people’s children—“captivating, heartbreaking, and a tour de force,” said the blurbs, but the missing words were “sniveling witless drivel” and “self-important and tone-deaf” and “the sensibility of a concrete slab.” I read through the first five pages and wonder why the author bothered. The Humor shelf is shorter than the selection of anchovies at the grocery—nobody under 50 wants to be labeled a “humorist,” they want their whimpering to be taken seriously. I don’t want to know these writers; I’ve been avoiding people like them all my life, I hear their voices from across the room and I go outdoors.

And I realized there are ten times more people off the grid than on it. The mainstream is a narrow creek. Getting off the grid is a good move, you gain freedom. Except for baseball and some comedy, I haven’t watched TV since I was forty and I used all that free time to make a life for myself.

And so you become an old fart. Flatulence happens. The muscles of the digestive tract degenerate and metabolism slows and the production of stomach enzymes lightens and your lazier lifestyle allows food to sit in the gut longer, and so I sometimes walk into a room, attempting to hold the gas in, but the tightening of the anal embouchure only produces more articulated farts and a whole string of them sound like a sentence, like “Hope for the best and prepare for the worst” or “If ifs and ands were pots and pans there’d be no trade for tinkers,” and this makes my wife collapse in hysteria. (Does she fart? No. She talks more than I do and so the pressure never builds up down below.)

I am a lucky man and before that, I was a lucky child. Luck is not the same as privilege. Privilege is having a chauffeur and luck is when the train comes just as you go through the turnstile and walk across the subway platform just as the train stops and the doors open, which makes your entire day up to that point feel fortuitous, perfectly timed, and you feel blessedness. Having a chauffeur makes you sheepish. In the eighth grade, I was working a power saw in shop class, which was where they stuck boys who couldn’t do higher algebra, and I was joking around with a pal, the rotary blade screaming through a 2×6, and Mr. Orville Buehler was horrified by my heedlessness—he could see a prosthetic device in my future—and he ran up and turned off the saw and said, “All you do is talk in class so I’m sending you up to Speech where you can get credit for it” and up from the basement I went to Miss LaVona Person’s classroom, a major turning point in my life, where I discovered the sublime pleasure of making people laugh, something my fundamentalist parents had neglected to teach me. In the course of two weeks, thanks to Mr. Buehler, I got set on a path to show business. For most people, education and diligence and discipline are the keys to success, but what opened the door for me was ineptitude at the power saw.

I was lucky to have parents who were crazy about each other, a romance made urgent by wild horses. John met Grace in 1931, the dark Depression, and the courtship went on for five years, Grandma needed Dad on the farm after Grandpa died, and one day, driving a manure wagon towed by a double team of horses that spooked and galloped out of control, Dad almost broke his neck when the wagon crashed, and felt his own mortality and the romance became urgent and four months later she was pregnant and they ran off and got married. This wonderful story was kept secret all their lives, but we could see the tenderness between them.

We were Sanctified Brethren. We didn’t go in for jokes and we avoided rhythmic movement for fear it would lead to dancing, which could lead to fornication and we didn’t play musical instruments for fear we might display talent, which then might lead to employment in places where liquor is consumed and when we sang hymns it was in slow mournful tones like a fishing village keening for its men lost in a storm, but we worshipped the Book, studied it word for word, and we were storytellers, the one art form Jesus embraced in the parables. And my mother, unlike other Brethren, loved comedians, especially Lucille Ball and Jonathan Winters and Burns & Allen, and laughed hard at jokes, and I inherited this love from her.

I was a bookish boy and decided to be a writer out of admiration for H.L. Mencken (“A historian is an unsuccessful novelist. A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there. A theologian is the man who finds it. A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.”), which seemed like a cool thing to be. I had 20 aunts, some of whom thought I was very bright and said so. I wrote poems that impressed them.

I was 14 when I made the transition from one-armed carpenter to performing humorist and now I am almost 80, which in itself is remarkable. I chain-smoked for 20 years and drove with careless abandon, no seat belt, sometimes after a couple martinis and a snootful of red wine, and my main exercise was walking fast in airports and lifting the roller bag into the overhead so by rights I should be in the Pulmonary Unit with an oxygen tube up my nose and instead here I am, a free man smelling the coffee as it brews, and remembering a song I used to sing on the radio.

Smells so lovely when you pour it,
You will want to drink a quart
Of coffee.
It’s delicious all alone, it’s
Also good with doughnuts,
Fresh coffee.
Coffee helps you do your duty
In pursuit of truth and beauty.
On the prairie or the canyon
It’s your favorite companion.
Tea is overrated,
You do better caffeinated with coffee.

Coffee stimulates your urges,
It is served in Lutheran churches,
Keeps the Swedes and the Germans
Awake through the sermons.
Have a pot of it today,
I’m sure you’ll say, “That’s awfully good coffee.”

I went to college when it was dirt cheap and so did not graduate with my feet in concrete blocks of debt, but was free to imagine a big future. I quit an easy and secure job in Academia that I hated and so was free to get a job offer from a brash young radio station where I wound up spending 40 happy years.

In college, I aspired to be a phenomenal intellectual so I wrote hallucinatory verse and dark stories about a lonely inarticulate hitchhiker with a guitar on his back, leaving one busted romance and heading for another, singing,

I did not go to Harvard, I couldn’t make the grade.
All that I have learned I learned by riding freights.
Sorrow was my major and tuition was low cost,
Louise was my professor and she told me to get lost.
I tried to be a writer but everything went wrong.
Once I had a woman, now she’s just a song.

He played for drinks in bars along the way and died with no ID so was buried under a cardboard tombstone with MAN written on it and his guitar was given to the bartender’s wife who used it for a planter, to grow hydrangeas in. I showed this story to several women who said, “It’s so sad” and they set out to cheer me up. So it served a purpose. But eventually I had to earn a living and landed a job in radio working the early morning shift, which I got by virtue of being willing to get up at 4 a.m. M–F. I was the lone applicant. Eventually I learned how to do a radio show—I went back to comedy, which had worked for me in Miss Person’s class—people do not want to be made to feel bad first thing in the morning, that’s their children’s job—so I wrote humorous songs:

The engineer was sentenced to death
And he went to the guillotine
But they couldn’t get the blade to drop,
Something wrong with the machine.
They decided he’d suffered enough,
Decided to send him to jail.
But he said, “Hey get me some pliers,
I see where the blade got stuck on the rail.”

And heading down the comedy road I stayed in business until I was 75 though I have no actual definable talent: I have the personality of a barber and fans of my show are shocked to meet me and find a tall silent expressionless man and realize that all those years they had been listening to a Listener.

My life is full of mistakes: When you’re almost 80, what’s the point of denial? An old man is free from other people’s opinion of him. My wife loves me dearly, my daughter thinks I can do no wrong. I also have a number of friends. Maybe 20 or 24. It’s enough. I never trusted compliments and now I trust them even less. Prizes are a hoax, every single last one, and people who flash their awards are only advertising their insecurity.

Major historic mistakes, I look back now and see, occurred with the appearance of the 17-year-cicada. In 1953, at age 11, I first saw New York City on a trip with my dad, which made a deep impression—it made me status-conscious since I was the only kid in the sixth grade at Sunnyvale School who’d been to Manhattan and gone to the top of the Empire State and stood in the crown of Miss Liberty and this exclusivity thrilled me and it was part of my wanting to be a writer, writing being a major industry in New York, and then wanting to write for The New Yorker and I devoted 24 years of my life to this fool’s errand of trying to sound like the sophisticated We of Talk of the Town, which was amusing and somewhat remunerative but utterly misbegotten. As stupidities go, it was like claiming to have a degree from Oxford or be Katharine Hepburn’s cousin.

Seventeen years later, in 1970, I went into radio and spent most of my adulthood trying to do shows that were beyond my reach. I loved radio, having grown up listening to it, and tried to re-create what I had loved, and in the process I met some wonderful people, some of whom are friends to this day, but I never did a show that was good enough for me to want to listen to it afterward.

In 1987, I moved to Denmark (dumb) and attempted to be a Dane and speak childish Danish even to people with shelves of English novels and histories and discovered how American I am, finding it unpleasant to live among people who didn’t know the hymns of my childhood or who Emerson was or Rod Carew. In 2004, I wrote a book about my left-wing views and thereby alienated half of my audience and most of my family and what good did it accomplish? Nada. And now, in 2021, I write a book about the beauty of getting old. Who am I trying to convince? Myself. No, cicadas have been a trigger for me and I am worrying about 2038, me at age 96, my wife 81, how shall I care for her, can I still amuse her, will climate change force us to live in Sweden, how will we do the daily crossword, is it possible to get major league baseball on Swedish cable?

I never got involved with Lyme disease or hashish or fentanyl and I escaped from the University of Minnesota after a year of grad school and so didn’t wind up an unemployed English instructor working temporarily as a dog walker. I successfully dodged the draft and simply didn’t report for induction when ordered to and the feds never came after me. You do what you need to do. I switched to comedy, and I had a little success, then a little more, talking about my small town of coffee drinkers, and then Will Jones, the Minneapolis Tribune entertainment columnist, wrote a big warm embrace of a story, and Suzanne Weil gave it the Walker Art Center seal of approval and that was the beginning of many good things. This string of good luck persuaded me that God loves me, which is not how it’s supposed to work—adversity and suffering are what draw you close to the Lord, not comfort and pleasure, but the lonely hitchhiker got a job in radio and he liked it and felt useful. Years later, I heard that some young Buddhist monks in Nepal were fans of the show and loved my song “Slow Days of Summer,” according to their ESL teacher Jennifer who stopped me on Amsterdam Avenue to tell me, in particular, the verse:

  I love you, darling,
Waiting alone.
Waiting for you to show,
Wishing you’d call me though
I don’t have a phone.

Young monks felt embrothered to the singer waiting for his love to come and I felt honored. Everyone needs to be useful.

I prospered. For a few years I owned a brick manse with a walled backyard you could’ve held fêtes and galas and formal embassy receptions in, had there been embassies in St. Paul. I bought a palatial flat in Copenhagen suitable for the queen had she been free for lunch. I had four credit cards in my wallet and was fond of Scotch, the Scottish kind made by Scots, and earthy beers and gin made from Icelandic glaciers, and I never met a wine I thought was overpriced, and then I took the plunge into sobriety and didn’t look back. But that’s all in the past, those buses left a long time ago. I came through the straits of privilege unharmed. Cleansed, in fact.

In 2003, I met a guy at a party who knew the guy who was Robert Altman’s lawyer and so one day I went to Mr. Altman’s office and pitched a movie and the great director (M*A*S*H, Nashville, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Player), unbeknownst to me was seriously ill at 78 and big studios were leery of investing in him but he intended to keep working until he dropped and I had an important advantage, some motivated investors, so we made the movie in 2005, the year before he died, and Meryl Streep had never worked with him and jumped at the chance, and the movie came out and got decent reviews—the guy in Rolling Stone said it was better than he’d expected it to be—and months later I was eating lunch with friends at the Café Luxembourg on 70th and Broadway when, as I brought a forkful of salad to my mouth, a woman rushed up and bent down and kissed me on the cheek and the whole café took a deep breath. It was Ms. Streep, who’d been eating lunch 30 feet away. Nobody in the café knew me from a bale of hay except the two friends and they were astonished beyond words and still are, 15 years later. Ms. Streep generates light, and when she gives you a smacker, you feel electricity pass through your body. I forget the plot of the movie but I remember the lunch.

Life is good. I can agonize with the best of them about the puritanical progressives and the Ayn Rand majority on the U.S. Supreme Court and the Republican embrace of unreality but I still love doing shows at 79 and during intermission the audience stands and we sing, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord” and the sopranos take over and I switch to bass and we look over Jordan and see the angels and we ride an old paint and lead an old dan and you are my sunshine and I’ll be your baby tonight and all I want is see you laughing in the purple rain, and this makes me deeply happy, and so does writing a book about the joyfulness of aging. It’s nothing you look forward to and when you’re in it, you know there’s only one way out and it may be a rough ride, so love today with your whole heart and leave next week to the actuaries and next month to the economists, and next year to the geologists.

Well-to-do, middle-class, broke,
Whether you doze or are woke,
If you’re still alive
At age 65,
Remember this, Jack,
There’s no turning back,
You’ve joined us elderly folk
And you won’t get out till you croak
So take sheer delight
In today and tonight
Though you are early baroque.
Delight in the days,
Let each one amaze.
Life is a pig in a poke.
The music, the talk,
The afternoon walk,
Every ding of the clock at the stroke.
Thank God for each breath
And remember that death
Is the punchline of the whole joke.

My freshman poli-sci teacher, Asher Christensen, gave a learned lecture on the separation of powers, went to the Faculty Club for lunch, lay down on a couch and died of a heart attack at 57. My best friend Barry Halper took his eye off the road for a minute and crashed into the rear of a stopped school bus and died at 21. I think of the poet Roethke who died at 55 for lack of a drug I take twice daily. (A lively understandable spirit once entertained you. It will come again. Be still. Wait.) He grew up in Saginaw, Michigan, a factory town where men like to slide into the bars at 9 a.m. and enjoy a few hours of oblivion. Roethke was a drunk and he also wrote I knew a woman lovely in her bones, when small birds sighed she would sigh back at them. I gave a speech in Saginaw once and afterward the chairman of the speech committee said, “It’s so hard to get first-rate speakers to come to Saginaw.” I didn’t ask what he meant; he sounded like he needed a drink. I quoted Roethke in the speech, the lines God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there, and learn by going where I have to go. Death at 55 is much too soon, so thank you, God, for science.

My colleague Tom Keith who was in radio with me for 30 years doing sound effects and various voices, especially teenagers and talking dogs and monosyllabic husbands, died at 64 of a pulmonary embolism on a Sunday evening at his home in Woodbury, just felt sick and fell down and died in the ambulance racing to the hospital along a street he had always driven on to Lunds to buy groceries and that was six days after a party after A Prairie Home Companion, where someone asked if he had tapes of our early shows together, and he said, “We are buying them up off eBay and destroying them one by one.” Then he was dead. This happens more and more. I went to visit Paul Yandell at his home in Nashville, sitting in a wheelchair, tubes in him, and reminisced about our days on tour with his boss Chet Atkins, and I told him to be sure to come see my show at the Ryman in April, and he leaned forward, out of earshot of his wife, and whispered, “The doctor says I won’t make it past January.” Then he died a few days before Thanksgiving, a fine second guitarist who stuck with Chet like a shadow, gone, taking wonderful stories with him.

Once on a small jet heading west in rough weather over the Rockies, Paul leaned forward and said, “I can see the headline, ‘Chet Atkins and Garrison Keillor and Six Others Die in Plane Crash,’ and I’d be one of the Others.” I said, “Paul, when we die, we’re all Others.” A little bit of truth.

In 2001, feeling breathless, I found myself a good doctor, my cousin Dan, who listened to my heart and shipped me off to Mayo for open-heart surgery. I was 59. Two uncles died at 59 of the same heart problem—a mitral valve prolapse—that Dr. Orszulak repaired, a procedure that wasn’t available for Uncle Bob or Uncle Jim. When my dad lay in a hospital in 1999, the man in the next room was Dr. C. Walton Lillehei, the father of open-heart surgery, also the papa of the pacemaker, which I have too. He died of cancer. Two years later, the operation he pioneered saved my life.

Maybe I have 10 more years. What a gift. A whole decade to enjoy clocks ticking, fresh coffee, a walk in the park, deep-fried cheese curds and chili dogs, singing “Under African Skies” with a tall woman, the pictures on my phone of my wife and our daughter grinning, and the video of the audience singing “It Is Well With My Soul” and the pleasure of writing a twisty sentence that will be the beginning of a column. I sit in a café on Amsterdam Avenue, couples walk past and a long-legged runner in denim shorts who, three feet from me, lets out a burst of methane like the honk of a goose, a feature of New York, beautiful women who express themselves freely and without apology. All along the avenue, people kibitz, chew the fat, schmooze, shoot the breeze, conducting multiple centripetal contrapuntal conversations, and the cops stop for a smoke, the waiter grins as she sets down the bill, which moves me to tip her 40 percent, that smile that says, “Oh, earth, you are too wonderful,” which I couldn’t say when I was young and cool and now that I’m not, I can and do. Happiness is a close marriage and having work to be done. Others have known this same happiness. Fascinated by the naked female form, Botticelli, Gauguin, and Goya kept knocking out the nudes, despite syphilis, liver damage, lead poisoning, and the knowledge that their death would wildly inflate the market value of their work, creating fortunes for the Duke of Earl and other arrogant schlumps and nothing for the artist’s heirs. Posthumous prosperity: a rotten deal. But onward they went, spritzing the paint, washing the brushes.

I want to write a novel about an old man who takes a drug that makes him 26 and he is horrified by youth and being swamped by lustful ambition and hanging out with stupid people and in a suicidal panic he throws himself into the river but is rescued by an old woman in a canoe and her kindness renews his faith in the goodness of humanity and the drug wears off and the next day he’s old again and they sit down to a pleasant lunch in the park and a glass of wine and he tells her about his amazing experience and she has him committed to a mental hospital where, oddly, he feels more at home. But first I need to write this book about the glory of getting old. The world needs this book and I seem to be the one to write it. My wife has read parts of it that come later and she says it’s good.

© Garrison Keillor, 2021

Serenity at 70, Gaiety at 80: Why you should keep on getting older was published November 15, 2021. The author has also recorded an audiobook, available below.

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You make me happy when skies are gray

I’m happy to wear a COVID mask, having gone through life with a grim mug due to my childhood spent listening to sermons about the End Times, and the mask lets people imagine I’m smiling, and so everyone is friendlier. I’ve tried to smile into a mirror and it looks like the leer on a landlord’s face as he throws the penniless tenant out into the snow. My mother hoped I’d be a teacher but I would’ve terrified the children so I went into radio. A good move.

I went to the dentist’s office last week and was astonished by the photos of smiling faces on the wall — how do people manage to do this? A grin that shows upper teeth, even gums! So the mask makes me normal. I may get a flesh-colored one with a smiling mouth on it and wear it after COVID is history.

This dental practice is mostly female and I, who’d never met a woman dentist before, was struck by the thought that women should’ve taken over dentistry long ago. I’ve had seventy years of dentistry, my mouth is a dental museum, the Smithsonian has shown interest in acquiring it, and the gentlemen dentists I’ve encountered worked on my mouth as if I were an inanimate machine, a defective lawn mower, and pain was of little consequence. Every one of us, when we sit in the dentist’s chair, becomes a seven-year-old child, and Dr. Choi and Judy the hygienist had a light touch, were caring and tender and addressed me as “dear,” which mostly wiped away memories of the End Times and the Judgment. I wrote them a limerick:

Dr. Choi and the hygienist Judy
Are out to improve patients’ beauty
But in my case,
With my tragic face,
There was no plastic surgeon on duty.

An hour at the clinic and I walked home feeling that here, amid the viral plague and climate change and the death knell of democracy, was a sign of actual progress in the world. Women taking over a male preserve. This, along with YouTube and Wikipedia and the iPhone with the map app that if you text “stationery store” in the box, it will show you instantly the closest ones and if you press “Directions” will guide you step by step to whichever one you choose.

When you grow up hearing End Times talk, it discourages you from imagining self-improvement, but thanks to fundamentalism I went into the field of comedy, based on the principle that “Life is a series of sinking ships and comedy is a life preserver,” and I found a style of zany fatalism that went well with my coroner’s face. I played a lovesick cowboy on the radio and a mystified private eye and a hopeless novelist and told stories about a small town populated by reticent Lutherans, and this so-called career stumbled along well enough, and now on the verge of old age, I look around and am encouraged by the advance of civilization.

Using my phone I can transmit a photograph of my immediate surroundings to distant friends, an enormous advance over the old Kodak Brownie and the week’s wait for film to be developed and then mailing a picture to a friend. This little device, developed by teams of technowizards for the sheer challenge of it, has enormous humanistic value, sending a clear color image of a Greek diner on 23rd Street in New York, the cook in white, my plate of eggs and corned beef hash, the traffic beyond the front window, to a friend living in the woods of northern Minnesota. It takes five seconds to flash this snapshot and she shoots me back a picture of snowy fields and a lonesome pine. Not a word is spoken, but two realities are exchanged.

I look at her picture and think of Robert Bly’s poems about Minnesota winter, his love of silence, something he said about being nourished by sorrow. Thanks to my sorrowful face, I have few friends but I treasure them all, knowing how hard it must be to converse with a sphinx, and I maintain a lighthearted conversation for their benefit and doing that, I cheer myself up. I look forward to 2022. I’m rejoining my old gospel quartet to sing bass, I’m writing a book called Comic Medications, I have a wife who is a necessity in my life like coffee and music and Google and metoprolol. Happy New Year to all. Hang in there. Lighten up. Brush twice daily and don’t forget to floss.

 

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I am dreaming of a light Christmas

I love Christmas because my mother did and she fought for it against her fundamentalist husband who felt it was worldly and unscriptural, but Grace loved the stockings and tree, the wrappings, the songs, the dinner, and all the more for the fact that her mother died when my mother was seven. Twelve children racked with grief, a grim household in south Minneapolis, which made the festivity all the more precious.

It was interesting to hear this annual argument between two people who loved each other dearly. I knew that, doctrinally, Dad was correct but Mother’s position was one of love, and love prevailed, and we had Christmas year after year.

I’ve had some dismal Christmases. The Christmas of the goose, when I took the goose out of the oven and hot grease spilled on my wrist and I dropped it and the glass baking dish broke and the goose skidded across the kitchen floor collecting cat hair and glass fragments. One year we did a Dickensian Christmas, had a tree with candles, did a group reading of A Christmas Carol and discovered that Scrooge has all the good lines, and nobody wants to be a Cratchit, they are such wimps. The reading was interrupted by screams — the tree was on fire. Candles make sense if you have a freshly cut tree and ours had been harvested in September in Quebec. But the fire rescued us from Dickens so all was well.

One of my favorite Christmases was the “Orphans Christmas” many years ago when we had ten guests at dinner, all of them musicians far from their families, a very lively bunch, and I, the lone writer, cooked the rib roast and waited on table. They were friends of my wife and all knew each other from freelance gigs so it was an accidental family, and they were full of stories and the conversation never sagged and the repartee sparkled and I didn’t have to say a word, which, as a Minnesotan, I appreciated. I come from withdrawn people, I know how to stifle myself.

Welcoming visitors is a Christmas tradition going back to the ones from the East who brought frankincense and myrrh, and
this year we are entertaining our London relations who brought cookies and arrived during a Minnesota blizzard, which they thought was perfectly wonderful. My son-in-law came in on a bitterly cold morning and said, “Delightful.” They brought merriment with them, which is the best you can hope for from a guest, and all week long the flat, what we think of as an apartment, has been full of talk and laughter. I’ve learned the expression “two shakes of a rat’s tail,” which means Very Soon. We put tomahtoes, not tomatoes, in the salad and learned that “smart” means stylish, not intelligent, and heard words such as “smashing” and “brilliant” that we laidback Midwesterners hesitate to use. One morning over breakfast, I got a long fascinating lecture about the Saxons and Normans and the Battle of 1066, with some footnotes about the decorous execution of Charles the First in 1649. I can’t recall another time when beheading was discussed at breakfast. Fascinating. It was a chilly day and Charles dressed warmly so he wouldn’t shiver, which the crowd might interpret as cowardice. He himself gave the signal for the ax to descend and his head was severed with one blow.

These Londoners are ambitious hikers and don’t sit around waiting to be entertained, they go out and look and come back exhilarated, even euphoric, by what they’ve seen. An old Soo Line freight car, a display of Victorian lamps, a Christmas tree lot, the light at dusk.

I am a quiet man, descended from a culture in which a great deal is left unsaid. Children were shushed and so learned to shush themselves. When I was young, I thought enthusiasm betrayed naivete, and I am still trying to escape from this straitjacket. Christmas cannot make us merry unless we’re willing to step out of our self-imposed restraints and celebrate, which I used to do with whiskey and wine but put all that away twenty years ago. But the day dawned on the 22nd and the north began to tilt toward the sun and life resumes. Meanwhile we have each other and if someone knocks on your door, invite them in, and it’ll be Christmas.

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The emergence of blues billionaires

Bruce Springsteen selling his music to Sony for a half-billion dollars has gotten me thinking about my music and what I might get for the songs I wrote when my radio show was touring the country, such as my song for Milwaukee (“Where men still wear hats they look rather sporty in/And children still take lessons on the accordion”) and one in Idaho (“People move here from New York and New Joisy/To get away from the frantic, the noisy,/For the simple pleasures of Boise”) or: “I love Washington, D.C./In summer it is the place to be./Girls run across the lawn playing catch with a red plastic disc/By the Washington Monument obelisk.”

Bruce wrote about being on the run and down and out, but so have thousands of other songwriters, and I believe I’m one of the few who wrote a song about the beauty of our nation’s capital. Or Harvard (“The campus throbs with the fevers/Of serious overachievers”) or Hollywood:

Past Sunset & Gower, and the old Columbia studio,
Home of Frank Capra, and Curly, Larry and Moe,
And here is the gate they used to walk through:
Nyuk nyuk nyuk. Woo woo woo.

You get my drift. Bruce was going for the universal, I was going for local. Bruce gave voice to a certain male sense of superiority in being an alienated fugitive and I spoke to the pride of being in love with a place, such as Katz’s Deli on the Lower East Side:

Americans trying to be British
Avoid speaking Yiddish
But the delicatessen known as Katz’s,
For Republicans or Democrats is
A beacon of corned beef and pastrami,
As permanent as Leviticus or Deuteromi.

Why am I quoting my songs? Because I’m looking for a buyer. Bruce’s big hit song about guys driving hot rods to escape from the hometown that’s a death trap, a suicide rap –– sorry to say this, Sony, but that song is history. Men don’t drive souped-up cars or dream of the hobo life, they worry about air pollution and they want to be good fathers. It’s only wealthy executives who think they’re “Born To Run,” the guys who can afford the $500 tickets to see Bruce on Broadway. The hitchhiker is a faded American legend. People are loyal to a town, not to a highway, as I say in my song about Bend, Oregon:

Life is sweet
At 3,625 feet.
No wonder so many people relocate
To a city named for not being straight.

Or the one I wrote for Seattle:

Everything is uphill in Seattle
Everything is an uphill battle
People do not coast in this town
They’re never depressed, or feel let down
You climb the hill and find a stair
And it takes you way up there.

What the Sony execs don’t realize is that by making Bruce a half-billionaire, they are destroying the lonely fugitive image that made him appealing in the first place. Bruce wrote about being born in a dead man’s town, beaten like a dog, in the shadow of the penitentiary, with nowhere to go, but when you sell your lamentations for a half-billion, you sort of destroy the authenticity. It’s like buying Emily Dickinson’s little house in Amherst so you can build a 22-story hotel and casino and shopping mall next to it. Emily’s readers are horrified and the people who come to Emilyville to shop and play blackjack have no idea who she was. You are paying a lot of money to dig a hole.

I told this to my wife and she said, “If you’re so smart, why don’t you have an office on the 42nd floor?” which made me smile: I love a woman who can take me down a notch. I don’t think Bruce and Dylan and other giants whose catalogs are selling for millions ever wrote that sort of love song. So I have.

Come live with me and be my love
Here in the USA
And now and then make fun of
Stuff I do and say.
A witty woman I adore
Who speaks a snappy line
Which makes me love her all the more
When she puts her lips to mine.

And here’s another song Bruce never imagined:

Cross the Minneapolis border
To find streets in alphabetical order:
Aldrich, Bryant, Colfax, Dupont,
Emerson, Fremont, Girard,
All the order a man could want
And each house with a well-kept yard.

What he ran away from, I embrace. Let’s start the bidding at a hundred million. Do I hear a hundred and twenty?

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I hereby resolve to look on the bright side

I’m in favor of diversity, inclusivity, reclusivity, multiplicity, reciprocity, irony, everything on the shelf, because last week I was the luckiest guy in America, going around doing shows and because I have double vision the crowds looked even bigger than they were. I was working the northern tier of states so it was an audience of stoics who needed cheering up as the darkness descends, many of them older folks who wonder why they don’t resettle in Florida, and I needed to tell them why: because they’re needed to defend our northern border against the rapacious Canadians.

Nobody bad-mouths Canada. Why not? We trash everything else. What makes them so hoity-toity? They have an unsingable national anthem, their bacon is round, not in strips, they have five political parties and two languages — a recipe for confusion — and they have no South to look down on as we do with Alabama and Mississippi. And the border is porous. Some places in Minnesota there’s only a barbed wire fence, and not a tall one but an ordinary three-strand fence like at a pig farm. You could detach the wires and drive right on through. Canadians are virtually undistinguishable from us, except for a couple vowels they mispronounce. We could have millions of them living illegally here and we’d never know it. And it wouldn’t be the best and brightest Canadians.

No, we’re seeing an enormous influx of angry Canadians, the malcontents, anti-vaxxers, irrationalists, deniers of science, polar people, Trumplets, arguing that east is west and jagged is straight, and there is nothing we can do about it except hope they go away, and in the meantime, let us simply ignore them.

Ignorance has been an excellent strategy for me. I could listen to Fox and it’d make me furious, but I don’t and I save a lot of time that I’d spend chewing the carpet. I pass people on the street who’re talking to themselves and I imagine they’re talking on an invisible phone. I used to correct people’s bad grammar, such as using “that” instead of “which,” which seemed pointless so I quit that. If I saw that someone’s hair was on fire, I would step in to help, but otherwise I keep my nose out of it.

I live for pleasure, whenever it pokes its head up, such as during a show in Holland, Michigan, in a basketball arena, where I found an audience of older folks who can sing “America” from memory and also “America The Beautiful” and “I’ve Been Working On The Railroad” and “The Sloop John B.” I was walking among them, leading the singing, singing bass, and I took a big chance and launched into “It Is Well With My Soul” — and they all knew it and sang it with feeling! Thanks to the religion of sports, which is slowly devouring Sundays, Protestantism is fading fast in America and in a decade or two, when the churches are turned into condos except a few that become museums and my people are meeting in caves as they did back in the Roman Empire, you won’t ever find a thousand people like the crowd in Michigan that knew the words to “It Is Well With My Soul.”

In fact, soon there will be no common musical culture. Schools have eliminated all American folk songs that contain violence or show bias or are militaristic or elitist or that marginalize or alienize or disparage or fail to address systemic inequality, which eliminates all the songs we loved to sing in grade school, so the younger generation only knows the music of its favorite pop stars, Melvin T or Bon Ami or the Philistines, but there is no band like the Beatles that touches a broad demographic.

So be it. Let it be. I have no complaint with that. I am only happy for those minutes in Holland, Michigan, when I stood, microphone in hand, among a thousand people who knew all the songs I know. Suddenly I had sunshine on a cloudy day, it was cold outside but inside it was the month of May.

Maybe I’m just singing in the rain but I want to hold your hand ’cause when I touch you I feel happy when skies are gray and I have a wonderful feeling everything’s coming my way, guiding us through the night with a light from above. Love. That’s the only thing I’ve plenty of.

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I’ll buy lunch, you fly the plane

We old Anglo guys have a bad habit of grabbing the check after lunch and I realize it’s a macho power move, dismissive, marginalizing, elitist, sexist, oppressive, colonialist, and a number of women have told me over the years, “You shouldn’t have done that,” but I notice, now that I’m old and slow and not so grabby, that they don’t reach for the check and it sits there in plain sight for several minutes before Anglo Man picks it up, when perhaps a woman says, “Won’t you let me contribute something?” and I say, “It’s my pleasure,” which they take to mean, No. End of story.

I’m not complaining. I enjoy inconsistencies and people who say one thing and mean another. My father, whom I knew as solemn and righteous, could be very funny and charming around young women. My mother, though a devout evangelical, adored comedians. I, though I may appear capable, am lost without my wife and after a week of separation I fall into a black hole and am incapable of doing business.

In my grievous isolation, missing her voice, her hand on my shoulder, I put on a CD of the Bethel Gospel Quartet, a male quartet from Bethel AME church in Mobile, Alabama, who recorded for Victor in the late Twenties, and listened to them sing “We shall walk through the valley in peace” and was stunned by the gorgeousness of their singing, the big bass, the baritone lead, the two tenors, unaccompanied singing, the stateliness and the joy of it, four men weaving brilliant harmonic turns. And then I was blown away by:

The blind man stood in the road and cried,
The blind man stood in the road and cried,
Crying, “Oh Lord, show me the way,
Show me the way to go home.”

Four lines that sum up my whole situation so beautifully, sung by four Black men in Alabama who clearly love singing together, who are living in a cruel society where they must walk a careful line, avoiding missteps that could easily lead to lynching, but none of that is in their music. In their music, they are free as angels. I suppose Victor paid them some money for the recording session, and then they went back to being stonemasons or cooks or drivers, and here they are in full glory on my CD player in 2021, and the racists who stood ready to kill them have left nothing behind and are wholly and deservedly forgotten.

I am a white guy, except for some reddish patches and brownish hair, and I admit to being privileged. One privilege is the fact that you are reading what I’ve written. I admit that I sometimes fly first class, which I feel sheepish about because I’m from Minnesota where we are brought up to be self-effacing to the point of invisibility, and when I stride down the express lane past the mile-long queue of peasants in the Economy line, I feel apologetic, and want to hand out cards that say, “I fly first class because I have a painful back injury suffered while rescuing small children from the upper story of a burning orphanage,” but I walk along, eyes averted, face mask pulled up, and through the X-ray and I board the plane.

I am all in favor of diversity and inclusivity in theory, but when the pilot comes on the horn and welcomes us from the cockpit, I want to feel that he or she is a Republican. I want to hear authority in the voice, a growliness that comes from having shouted orders at people. I do not want my pilot to come on singing “Off we go into the wild blue yonder” and if he does, I’m off the plane. If it’s a woman pilot, I want her to be crisp and chill, not warm and caring. If she mentions turbulent conditions ahead, I don’t want to hear concern in her voice. I do not want her to thank us for flying — that’s for the flight attendants. I prefer my pilot to be a Republican with military service, preferably at the rank of captain or higher, preferably as an aviator, not in the Quartermaster Corps. I’m a Democrat and I’d be leery of a progressive Democrat pilot whose concern about air pollution might make him reluctant to use full power on takeoff. I don’t want anyone like me up front. No deep thinkers. A high-flier, please.

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How we raised the dough to go to Florida

Freedom is a beautiful thing when you’re young, allowing kids who know they should be focused on the perils of global warming to instead be fascinated by the troubles of Britney Spears, but for an old guy it means a loss of direction as the people whose approval you worked for die off and you’re left with no direction. My teachers have left the planet, my uncles who looked at me and shook their heads, my dad, and my editors who would look at this paragraph and say, “Nobody wants to know what you think about global warming. You’re a humorist. Be funny. Throw it out.”

So I now have an app on my laptop that sounds a shrill alarm when I write about global warming, race, gender, politics, or people whose last names begin with T such as Thoreau, Thackeray, Trillin, Justin Timberlake, or Tammy Tequila, and instead I shall write about my long court struggle to get free of the conservatorship imposed by my wife after I bought a dozen books, some of which we already had at home.

“You have a library card so why not use it instead of filling the shelves with expensive books, most of which you never bother to read.”

She could detect non-readership by putting confetti in the first page that’d fall out if the book were opened. I wasn’t aware of that.

So my credit cards were taken away and I was put on an allowance of $24 a week, which in Manhattan will hardly keep a man in snacks, so I was forced to panhandle, which, when you’re a white male in his 70s wearing a brown pinstripe suit and wingtips, is no easy matter. I pretended to be demented, which worked but only with other demented people, most of whom don’t carry much cash. I tried walking into a bank and telling the teller, “I’m a novelist working on a criminal mystery and I need to find out what it’s like to commit robbery so hand over all the cash in your drawer or else I’ll stab you with my ballpoint, but I promise to return the money immediately, I only want to have the experience.” They thought it was a joke.

My wife also accused me of putting too much milk on my cereal. “You practically fill the bowl with milk and you wind up throwing away most of it.” So she locked the fridge and I had to ask her to pour milk for me and she limited me to two tablespoons per bowl, not enough to so much as moisten the bran flakes, and so I went to court. My wife argued that it was a conservation measure, a milk-economizing mandate meant to reduce methane emissions by dairy cows, but my lawyer Sarah argued that rationing a man’s milk in his own home is cruel and unusual tyranny, and thank goodness I hired a woman attorney. The judge was a creepy old guy and Sarah is young and attractive and the guy couldn’t keep his eyes off her blouse, and right now my alarm is screaming at me and I have to shut it off.

Thanks. That’s better. My wife is a forgiving person and she’s put the conservatorship battle behind us. There is, however, Sarah’s bill to pay, $75,429.32, and I’ve had to sell my Rothko painting, “Vienna Midnight,” at auction. It’s a fake Rothko but with authentic Rothkos going for up to $82 million, a first-class fake can earn you a hundred grand, so we are all set, and with the remaining 25 thou, we’ll be able to spend January in Florida.

Down there, due to my wife’s fear of snakes and alligators, I become the one in authority. We go for walks and I carry a spear and a large rock and she clings to my side, trembling. Any movement in the underbrush and she is frozen with fear, and I, feeling empowered, reassure her that we’re okay. Water moccasins are very territorial and can roll themselves into a hoop and chase people at 15 mph for a considerable distance. Alligators are omnipresent and omnivorous. A man feels needed there. And my wife is happy to get away from winter weather and also there are no bookstores in Florida. People don’t go to Florida to read books. They go to enjoy the outdoors, especially when they have a big man with a spear and a rock to protect them.

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Mr. Socialist confesses a love of opera

Free enterprise is fascinating, especially for us socialist communists who want to make the world into a dormitory with a cafeteria where on Mondays everyone has mac and cheese and on Tuesdays franks and beans, and so forth, but with free enterprise you get to see old empires crash and bold upstarts take over the town, such as Uber and Lyft have done to the taxi trade. I’m a taxi fan, especially in New York, a great old taxi town where sometimes you run into a growly old cabbie right out of the movies who says, “Where to, bud?” and all the way through town he denounces the rich and famous, but nostalgia is no competition against smart technology.

You go on your app and it knows your location and you punch in “Where to” and in less than a minute it tells you that Muhamed will pick you up in three minutes and the charge will be $26.78 and three minutes later Muhamed rolls up. The cost goes to your credit card on file along with your designated tip. Muhamed is from Libya and doesn’t know the city like the old cabbie does but the lady in the dashboard gives him precise directions and he does very well. What’s not to like?

Free enterprise can be brutal. In New York, a couple years ago, owners of taxi medallions, the city-issued license to own a cab, conspired to drive the prices up, and corrupt lenders offered loans at high interest rates, and thousands of drivers got taken to the cleaners, just as the pandemic hit and Uber and Lyft were growing, and the Times reported nearly a thousand bankruptcies and eight driver suicides in one year.

So when I’m in New York, sometimes I hail a cab, out of socialist sympathy, but Uber and Lyft have come up with a better light bulb.

Capitalists say that you have to drown a few puppies in order to achieve progress, but I come from Minnesota, which is a socialist state in the sense that we identify with victims and feel guilty about whatever success we’ve achieved. In New York, success is admired and people love to go see Broadway stars on stage and world-famous sopranos at the Met and we expect the Philharmonic to be up to international standards. In Minnesota, we feel sorry for the sopranos who failed the audition, especially if they come from a dysfunctional family of modest means that couldn’t afford to hire a first-rate music teacher. We would support an opera company devoted to hiring disadvantaged singers rather than the shining stars and why not have them perform operas that have been rejected by other companies? Enough with the Puccini and Mozart, those guys have had their chance, let’s do the work of Tiffany Tufford and DuWayne DeVore. This strikes us as a Christian thing to do.

If you search through the homeless encampments and the treatment programs for substance abuse, you will find folks who used to play musical instruments, and why not hire them for your orchestra rather than privileged children from middle-class homes who took lessons from pros and majored in music at Juilliard?

Elitism is suspect in Minnesota, and this new opera company — let’s call it The Progressive Opera — would find a good deal of support. People would donate money to democratize opera who likely would not attend performances. This is where the idea of socialist art falls down. Art is visceral, it lifts you up or it lets you down, you can’t talk yourself into loving it. Puccini’s Madame Butterfly is so great that even if performed by the Grand Forks Opera Company by Lutheran singers, it will move you, and when you hear “Un bel dì” you will feel the tragedy, even if it’s Allison Nelson and not Anna Netrebko. But when they dump Puccini in favor of a justly neglected composer, the ship sinks. Nobody wants to sit in an auditorium and watch crappy shows except the relatives of people on stage and they’re only good for one performance.

So you’d need to give away sets of glassware or sell lottery tickets and the winner gets a trip to New York to see Bruce Springsteen on Broadway. People pay hundreds of bucks for those tickets who wouldn’t pay much to see my nephew Bruce Butler, the garage door tycoon in South Carolina. I just talked to him on the phone for an hour and he’s a good man, genuine and funny, but garage doors (unless you know something that I don’t) are not great art.

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The darkness descends and I talk to friends

“Omicron” sounds like a pharmaceutical, an omnipotent drug against deadly microbes of a chronic nature, but it’s a flu variant just setting foot in America, whose ingenuity is not yet known, so we have one more excuse to stay home and not go to big fundraising dinners or games where unmasked people stand close together and sing the school fight song, emitting clouds of droplets in the air with every “Fight, fight, fight” and “Rah, rah, rah.” I am scheduled to do some Christmas shows hither and yon and am debating whether I should, as I normally would, invite the audience to sing the song about all being calm and bright. I’ll certainly scratch the song about the figgy pudding but “Silent Night”? All of Christmas is in this lullaby. You could skip the stockings, the cranberries, the tree with the tiny lightbulbs, and if you and your loved ones only sang about the quaking shepherds, you’d have Christmas in your heart, which is where it belongs.

Some of my Danish relatives are crossing the Atlantic to join me for Christmas and we’ve made a solemn compact that it will be modest, and not the gaudy jamboree that the Danes put on. They call it Yule, which they spell “j-u-l,” and thereby leave Jesus out of it, and they cook a goose and hang real candles on the tree and light them and dance around it, singing, and polish off a good deal of mulled wine and by sunset on the 25th, the nation is fairly unconscious. A boatload of Swedes could cross the Storebælt and take over the country, but then they’d need to learn the language, and why bother? There are vowels in Danish that are pronounced low in the throat and can induce gagging.

So we shall light a candle at midnight and sing the song, and I’ll make turkey sandwiches on the Day and we’ll pick up a couple pine boughs from the corner Christmas tree stand, and we’ll sit and converse.

This is one benefit of the pandemic, the rediscovery of conversation. My interest in adding COVID to my list of life experiences is minimal and so we’ve seen few people this year, other than passersby, and we’ve rediscovered Mr. Bell’s telephone, a wondrous gift, especially now that the curly cord is gone and you can carry it everywhere. I was once in the radio business and so telephone conversation comes naturally to me.

I’m a writer and my best work is done before noon, which leaves plenty of time for palaver, and I have a dozen regulars on my list, and another couple dozen occasionals, and this dispels loneliness very nicely. I don’t do FaceTime because I have a forbidding face as a result of growing up fundamentalist. I walk down the street and small children look at me and cling to their mothers. I look like Cotton Mather with a migraine. But on the phone, I can be actually sort of charming.

So I am at home with my love who orders food to be delivered by a masked man and she reads hygienic e-books from the public library while I write a screenplay and we play Scrabble on a board cleaned with antiseptic wipes, same as our phones and our pillowcases. We go for walks but we avoid runners who are breathing hard. We do not talk to unvaccinated persons on the phone. When we receive mail from states with high COVID rates, we boil it for seven minutes.

I notice in my phone conversations that I seldom hear people say, “When we get back to normal” or “When this is all over.” People don’t talk about plans for next year, they talk about next weekend. I worry about our kids and grandkids who have decades ahead of them, on whom uncertainty must weigh heavily. I worry about Minneapolis, my mother’s beloved hometown, where, in her old neighborhood, shootings and stickups are commonplace. I worry about how the Supreme Court might rule if asked to defend the right of high school students to carry a loaded weapon to class. And what is the constitutional basis for compulsory school attendance? Why shouldn’t six-year-olds be free to take factory jobs? Their little hands would be perfect for assembling small parts.

I think about these things but it’s not what we talk about on the phone. I believe in cheerfulness. If the subject of death comes up, I sing: “Ole lay on his deathbed, he knew he was going to die. And then he got a little whiff of Lena’s rhubarb pie. He crept down to the kitchen; there it was, he let out a moan. Lena whacked him upside the head, she said, ‘That’s for the funeral, leave it alone.’” Thank you for your attention and goodbye.

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