Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 42

December is here, it is perfectly clear

Minnesota beat Wisconsin Saturday so hope is restored, the heart is lightened, and I am ready to enter the darkness of December unafraid. I got up early Sunday morning, grateful for the sensor in the bathroom that switches on the light when my physical form breaks an invisible beam. “Let there be light,” as the Creator once said, though He Himself has excellent night vision, and it felt good to be recognized as I stepped, half-asleep, over the threshold and all was made clear, the sink and mirror, the shower, the towel rack, and my target below, and I thought of Wisconsin and let fly.

Six a.m. and the city is only faintly enlightened. My early jobs as a dishwasher and parking lot attendant began at 6 a.m. and I remember this dimness well. It changed my life. I stayed home at night and went to bed early and postponed debauchery to my mid-twenties and then, at the age of 27, I got a job on the 5 a.m. shift and postponed it again. A dear friend of mine, whose parents subsidized her fully, went out late one night and fell in with some fascinating strangers who introduced her to hashish and some other substance and she fell into a psychotic state and had to be hospitalized and spent some time in a drug program where she met more fascinating troubled people and it changed her life. She never found a vocation. Instead, she became fascinated by her own disability and made a career of being troubled, married a troubled man who abused her, and today she’s in a nursing home somewhere, a faint replica of the witty woman she once was, and I am waiting for the coffee to brew so I can get back to work on a novel. Early to bed and early to rise makes for a life that, if not wealthy and wise, is at least pleasant and sensible.

The kitchen is dark because our friend Terry is sleeping in the guest room, which is just off the kitchen. She’s in town to play in The Nutcracker ballet, a difficult part that she’s played a thousand times so she has it down cold and can enjoy the comedy of the orchestra pit, the squawks and squeaks of the reeds, the smirks of the strings when the smart-aleck violinist screws up, the grimaces and snickers at the conductor who can’t conduct his way out of a paper sack, and she comes home and gives us a hilarious close-up account. To the audience, it may be pure magic, the Sugar Plum Fairy and all, but in the pit, it’s a human comedy.

I don’t turn the light on. I can hear the coffee dripping. I deliberate whether I shall go to church at 10 a.m. and it seems that I shall not; I am not in a proper frame of mind, being still exultant over beating Wisconsin. We were down 10-3 at halftime but the defense held and we won 23-13. Wisconsin has been kicking us around for years, thanks to their Teutonic culture, so this victory means a lot, sort of like D-Day or the Battle of the Bulge. I shouldn’t walk into church with this baggage. My sins are selfishness and ingratitude and animosity, and in the early morning, I’m very aware of my loved ones asleep in other rooms and am thankful for the cardiologist who implanted the defibrillator in my upper left chest, but I’m not ready to give up animosity.

I have two enemies, one in Fargo and one in Minneapolis, and I intend to forgive them someday but the defibrillator is postponing that day, and so I hope for them to have wagered their homes and retirement accounts on the Badgers of Wisconsin, a sure bet, and watched Minnesota march to victory, and heard the debt collectors pull up in the driveway, and hours later found themselves sleeping off a bad drunk in the bus depot with no place to go but their great aunt Flossie’s in Wausau, the one with the German shepherd Rolf and the picture of Joe McCarthy on the bedroom wall and the Victrola with the 78 of Wagner’s The Ride of the Valkyries.

And then I pour my coffee and turn on a light and pick up a pen and write, “Minnesota beat Wisconsin Saturday so hope is restored, the heart is lightened, and I am ready to enter the darkness of December unafraid.” And the rest is easy as pumpkin pie.

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Where I was last night and what I saw

Midnight and one a.m. and two, and the mind is racing around the track with lights flashing, me at the wheel but the wheel doesn’t respond, it’s a whirl of thoughts in chain reaction and I know I should turn on a light and read for a while, maybe a math book or Egyptian history, but I lie in the dark and excavate old episodes of my life, and not the happy ones. Playground bullies emerge who, if they’re alive, are ancient old men like me, but in my mind they’re fresh and eager, tormenting sensitive me, daring me to respond. I ignore them, as I tend to do still. Then Hitler appears. The war isn’t over. The Third Reich is in London, my Danish daughter is in danger, the Nazis have the A-bomb, so I drag myself back to the torments of the playground, a sweet slender boy with nicely combed hair and wire-rimmed glasses. And the thought leaps out at me: I was so nice, am I gay? Gay men are terribly nice, you know. By the age of 79, a man should know the answer, but my mind rolls it around. I decide I’m not, having had many girlfriends and no boyfriends. Also, I spill and I have no fashion sense. I could pass for a homeless person.

Now it’s three a.m. I had evacuated the marital bed out of simple courtesy, lest Hitler awaken my wife, and now I return, silently, like a thief, and the silence awakens her. “Can I go back to sleep?” she says. She is the designated worrier in the family. She listens to the radio at night, to drive worry away, but it’s the BBC so she lies awake worrying about codfishermen and Lebanon and Prince Harry and Meghan. I’ve always been a good sleeper but am quite awake at three and so is she, I can tell by the way she sighs. I wonder if insomnia is contagious. I wonder if in her mind it’s 1992 and she’s walking into that restaurant to meet me for the first time and spots me, tall, unkempt and yet pretentious, and thinks, “Oh no. Get me out of here. Not this.”

It’s a wild night, like the bumper cars at the state fair, memories crashing around, I walk down the Mall of the U of M campus and I skip my Milton class and decide to major in folk music instead, the CEO who fired me and was himself dismissed is hitchhiking in the rain and my right front wheel hits the mud puddle exactly right and turns him dark brown from toes to crown, I am offered the Nobel Prize, which I decline with a very noble speech about equality in the arts.

I guess I slept some. I awoke at nine. It’s ten-thirty now. I’ve had breakfast with my wife who is extremely funny describing her niece’s two children, a smart boy and a popular girl, fighting a guerilla war, and then she leaves for Boston where I’ll join her tomorrow. On her way out, she gives me detailed instructions, which I should write down but do not, choosing to live dangerously. And it dawns on me that since nine o’clock, I have been deliriously happy. Insomnia is supposed to leave you exhausted and depressed. I hear my mother saying, “You work too hard, you need your sleep.” She lay awake many a night, worrying about us six kids, she told me so when she was old. Then added, “But you were worth it.”

I think the mind needs now and then to be released from a lifetime of harness and who needs LSD when hallucinations come to you naturally? It was a wild night and as I write it down I’m aware that I’m remembering only a few slivers of it. It makes me wonder about the little defibrillator that the cardiologist installed in my chest a couple weeks ago: is there a secret feature of it that twice a month like clockwork stimulates the brain to take free flight in the universe. If so, I guess I am in favor, though I’d rather the brain did this of its own accord.

It’s good to get off the racetrack and resume normal life. Hitler was defeated. Life is good. The sun shines and we rise from our tangled beds and resume our purposes in the world. The blessed America will survive the festivals of dismay and rise to the challenge of the century, which is to save the planet from ourselves. Thank you, Irving Berlin, for writing that great song.

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A call to action: ignorant persons, unite

Personally I like the statue of Theodore Roosevelt on a horse standing majestically in front of the Museum of Natural History in New York, which I often pass on walks and so I’ve followed the controversy about the statue, along with the debate about the statue of Columbus at Columbus Circle.

The statue removalists argue that Roosevelt and Columbus were guilty of inappropriate treatment of indigenous people and so don’t deserve this prominence. The removalists, I’m sure, have done their homework and especially in the case of Columbus could cite cruel and outrageous deeds and I respect their seriousness. There’s an avenue named for Columbus and a university, plus the Circle, and you could change them all to Smith and it’s no problem for me. The statue in the Circle stands on a very high pedestal so as to make it harder for pigeons to defecate on him, so high that his gender is not clear, and I seldom bother to look up.

The mounted Roosevelt statue, it was announced last week, will be removed to Medora, North Dakota, where he spent some pleasant time living the life of a cowboy out west and refashioned himself as a man on horseback, which made it possible for him to be elected president. Medora is a town of 129 people, and I imagine they’ll be thrilled to get this work of art, which may attract people who’ll then stop in a café, have lunch, buy postcards, a souvenir blanket, coffee mugs, teddy bears, and so on. In New York, the statue is no big deal, just a guy on a horse.

This is my point. Ninety-nine percent of those who pass, the crowds of school children, the tourists, we ordinary folk who haven’t studied late 19th-century American history since high school and didn’t find it all that interesting — to us 99 percent, the statue is purely visual, with no particular significance. It is serious scholarship that makes it significant to the 1 percent. If a one-percenter stood below the statue with a loudspeaker and lectured us on Roosevelt’s misdeeds, I would stop and listen, but only for a few minutes, and then I’d walk on. So would you.

I don’t oppose removal, but I do feel that it leaves a gap, visually, and the stone pedestal the horse stood on demands somebody else take Roosevelt’s place. I nominate Kathryn D. Sullivan, the noted geologist and astronaut who was born across the river in Paterson, N.J. Manhattan is built on bedrock, a good foundation for those skyscrapers. Ms. Sullivan dug into the earth and went up in the sky. She’s perfect. I’d put her on that pedestal, holding a big jackhammer, cutting into the pedestal. I’m serious. Geologists don’t go around in ballgowns so you’d have to come up close to see she’s a woman and there you could read a plaque that would tell you something about her and the rock underneath you.

The news story about Roosevelt’s removal gave me a new word that I am eager to use: recontextualize. Removing Teddy to North Dakota would recontextualize him.

Let me insert two other words here: elitist hegemony. Statue removal is justified in the case of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson who were traitors to their country and knew it, but in the case of Roosevelt, it is a project of elitists who are smarter than the rest of us and seek to exercise authority. That is my recontextualization of the whole story. I wish Medora well; I think Roosevelt and his horse will feel more at home there than in Manhattan. If Columbus is hauled down off his towering pedestal and sent back to Genoa, its effect on my life is less than if you put No Parking signs up in front of my apartment building. I don’t own a car. I don’t drive. I ride the subway or I hail a cab.

But if you haul these guys down off their pedestal, how can you ignore Henry Hudson who sailed up the river when indigenous people — who were not friendly to him — occupied Manhattan? And what about the Duke of York? James Madison? The guy whom Lincoln Center is named for — how did he feel about women’s rights?

I am organizing a demonstration in Columbus Circle, holding big signs: DOWN WITH ELITIST HEGEMONY. STOP WEAPONIZING HISTORY OR WE WILL RECONTEXTUALIZE YOU RIGHT OUT OF TOWN AND THE HORSE YOU RODE IN ON. As soon as it’s warm again, let’s get together and march and then we can go have lunch at a little café on Smith Avenue.

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An old liberal repents and comes out for order

I used to make fun of law and order as “lawn order” but I don’t anymore. I was a motorist then and now I’m a pedestrian, and when you get down off your horse, you feel the value of civil order, it isn’t just an idea anymore. This happened when we took up residence in New York where having a car is mainly a hindrance, like owning a camel. Parking regulations alone can drive you nuts: Parking On Odd-Numbered Days Except Between 4 and 6 a.m. And During Snowstorms Of More Than Two Inches. And then there are times when traffic slows to 2 mph. So you walk.

I like New York because my wife loves it for the museums, theater, friends, and Central Park. If it were up to me, I’d go back to the log cabin in the woods where I lived when I met her, but here I am and it’s okay. But whenever I hear that awful song (“Start spreading the news”) I have to leave the room. New York life is not about being “king of the hill, top of the heap,” it’s about appreciating civil order.

A great civility prevails here. A woman stopped me the other day to point out that my shoelace was untied. I saw an old lady topple over and within three seconds, ten people were there at her side to assist and comfort. I ask directions and people are helpful. I’m a slow walker and younger people don’t thrust themselves past me, they yield. It’s a tolerant culture. You could go out walking in your pajamas and people would accept this as idiosyncrasy or they’d figure you were under indictment and going for the insanity defense. You could burst into tears in a café and people might offer the name of their therapist or tell you about something that happened to them recently. Homosexuality was never considered a sickness because that’d mean too many people not showing up for work.

You appreciate civility all the more when it’s threatened and these days New York is beset with a plague of e-vehicles, bicycles and scooters, the skinny kind you stand up on, that run silently like a torpedo at 30 mph, ignoring red lights, weaving through traffic and along bike lanes and sometimes onto sidewalks. The scooterist probably imagines he is a progressive but actually he is a terrorist. The only time the idea of gun ownership has crossed my mind was when an electric scooter swerved around me, running a red light, and I imagined pulling out my .357 Magnum.

The .357 Magnum was the gun Dick Tracy carried. As a child, I came home from church Sunday morning and read about Dick Tracy’s campaign against evildoers and so I grew up to be a decent person. At school I stood in line in the cafeteria, apologized if I bumped someone, and spoke when spoken to. Myrtle the cook dished up the Spanish rice and wieners and I said, “Thank you.” I sat at a table with the nice kids. Thus was I introduced to civil society. I avoided the school bully. (I met him at a class reunion recently and he told me about his extensive gun collection. No surprise there.)

When the scooterist zooms past me and barely avoids the stroller with two infants, I have to reconsider individualism as a way of life. I used to admire Thoreau who said, “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” But there were no electric scooters in Concord back then. And when I think, “Advance confidently without regard to red lights, and live the life you wish, ignoring what may be in your path, and you will succeed in scaring the bejesus out of people,” it doesn’t sound like Henry anymore.

When I made fun of “lawn order,” I was having fun feeling frisky but now, seeing the resistance to mask mandates and other public health measures, the political attacks on public education, something more ominous is going on. One hopes for the best: what else can you do? But I’m lucky to be in New York. I board the C train and the car is crowded and more and more people board until we’re packed in tight, standing inches away from each other, avoiding eye contact, contained in a tiny space, and to me it’s the ultimate in civility. A dense crowd of considerate people. Spread the news.

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Forget politics, let’s talk about something fun

I woke up this morning realizing that “woke” is now gone from the political vocabulary. It’s only used as an insult by people who never knew what it was about. The Democrats lost the Virginia election because they nominated an old hack; wokeness had nothing to do with it. “Woke” was an arrogant term never used by mature people except ironically. The fact is, we all have our weird biases and prejudices, I do, you do, it does, they do, and the point is to get a grip and be sweet. Or at least be civil.

Now that that’s settled, let’s talk about sex. We know each other well enough by now. I’ve read other columnists beating up on Democrats for being in disarray and I’ve thought, “I wonder if Mr. Grumpy just needs someone to put their arm around him and lead him upstairs to bed.” And Thanksgiving is coming and I am thankful for what that girl inspired in me who sat ahead of me in Sunday night gospel meeting in her short-sleeved blouse through one sleeve of which I could see a slight crescent of underwear. I was eleven or twelve and the preacher was talking about eternity in the smoking cauldrons of perdition as if it were scheduled for later in the evening and somehow this only intensified my interest in underwear. I’m sorry if this offends you, I am only making a clean breast of my loss of innocence.

Much later, Playboy magazine came along, in which girls removed their underwear and a boy could drive to a drugstore in a part of town where he was not known and tuck a copy into a Wall Street Journal and peruse it And later came Tropic of Cancer and Portnoy’s Complaint and now porn is freely available online though to me it has all the erotic allure of watching oil well pumps pumping in North Dakota.

No, what truly ushered me into the fields of delight was Julie the neighbor girl’s older cousin who one summer twilight after an hour of Capture The Flag asked me if I’d like to wrestle and, being polite, I said yes, and she grabbed me and threw me down and sat on me and announced she was going to kiss me and in that moment, at the age of 13, I learned my true sexual nature, which was to be submissive. I did not fight off her advance. I didn’t feel violated, I felt promoted.

Sex is about much much more than oil pumps levering up and down twenty times a minute pulling petroleum from deep in the earth. It’s about conversation. I’ve known shy submissive women, having grown up among Lutherans in Minnesota, and I am more attracted to women who speak their minds, especially ones who are smarter than I, and (of course) are attracted to shy submissive men like me.

There are pluses to growing up strict fundamentalist, as I did, and one is that the idea of romance is terribly thrilling, the thought of perhaps putting your arm around a girl and then, if she looks at you in a certain way and maybe leans toward you, you might turn your head at a slight angle so that your lips would meet her lips. (1) What would this feel like? (2) How long would it last? (3) Would she be disgusted and report you to authorities? (4) Or might she press against you in her excitement and seem to want something more? (5) What might “something more” mean?

I still get tremulous feelings when my wife walks into the kitchen in the morning in her nightgown. She is still sleepy, or unwoke, which I find appealing, and she sits on my lap, which is thrilling, especially if the nightgown has slipped off one bare shoulder, and if, as sometimes happens, perhaps once every six days or so, she turns and kisses me and says, “I love you,” all is right with the world. Virginia can deal with Youngkin the Pumpkin, I’m well-fixed. Then she pours herself a cup of coffee and when she’s woke, we talk, and this is what draws me to her. The talk. She has strong opinions about many things and I have always craved leadership and so I listen. She doesn’t get her opinions from reading opinion columns but from walking around in the city and listening and watching. Do likewise. Have a good day. Be sweet.

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Our house is on fire: let’s talk

My generation, the pre-Boomers, now known as the Humors, had it pretty easy, coming of age in the afterglow of World War II, believing in perpetual prosperity and progress, much of which came true, even as rock ’n’ roll provided the pleasure of rebellion without any consequence. Great medical advances came along just as we needed them, and Medicare to pay for them. We are lucky to have been born when we were.

I see the thousands of young protesters in the streets of Glasgow bearing signs such as “I Have To Clean Up My Mess, Why Don’t You Clean Up Yours?” and “The Dinosaurs Thought They Had Time Too” and “Stop Climate Crime” and “If Not Now, When?” at the UN Climate Change Conference, where the United States and China have issued vague promises of eliminating carbon someday but without a timetable. So much for American leadership; I guess we’re waiting for Iceland or Ecuador to show the way.

The young people in the streets are aware that a time of suffering lies ahead. Science is pretty clear about the
ecological impact of industrial agriculture and the rapacious destruction of forests and overfishing of the seas and the virtual disappearance of many insect species, but none of this has enough political impact to turn the ship of state. Statistics don’t move people, recognizable images do, such as the plight of a polar bear on an ice floe miles from land. We’re fond of polar bears in zoos, and if we could get a video of this bear drowning in glacial melt, it would move people. Or if Yellowstone blew up and ushered in a year of darkness. That could be the Pearl Harbor that moves our country to action.

Greta Thunberg, the 18-year-old Swedish activist who, in 2018 after Sweden’s fierce hot summer of wildfires and omens of disaster, sat outside the Swedish parliament every day to get her message across. Her message was simple: “Our house is on fire.”
Five words, not one wasted, and you could paint it on any wall and everyone would know what you mean.

Children have great power to shame the rest of us, as every parent knows, and this cause is worth their effort. It’s about the survival of our kind. Everything we love is in the balance, language, art, music, history, the art of story, dance, Eros, baseball, bird-watching, and the effect of apocalypse on the bond market would not be good.

The last Good War was won by boys who rushed to sign up, after seeing newsreels of sunken battleships in Hawaii. My hero Bob Altman was 16 and lied about his age to get into the Army Air Force and pilot a B-17 bomber in the Pacific. The children marching in Glasgow are capable of heroism, but they’ve put their faith in the conscience of politicians, not a good bet. One of the two major American political parties is in denial that global warming exists because it is devoted to an illiterate leader. That party appears likely to take over Congress in 2022 and two years later No. 45 may well become No. 47. If he does, we may have a constitutional convention at which the presidency is made a lifetime term. Meanwhile, we have a Supreme Court with a solid majority of Ayn Rand justices who deny that the state has the right to govern individual behavior. Gun control will be dead, conservation will be an individual responsibility.

I don’t see that bunch leading the country toward clean energy. So we’ll go on enduring wildfires and horrific hurricanes and drought and the melting of the arctic ice cap and nothing will change. We’re living in a tunnel and a train is approaching. Mr. Bezos and Mr. Musk can move to the moon but the rest of us are earthlings.

I put my faith in scientific enterprise. Someone will come up with a way to turn plankton into something that looks like and tastes like ground beef. Someone else will figure out how to make linguine from dead leaves. Then there’ll be nuclear airliners.

People don’t like to be lectured and made to feel stupid, Mr. Science. Get busy and invent a car that runs on urine. So much gas is wasted by people driving around looking for a lavatory. This will come as a great relief.

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Man contemplates miracle and is amazed

We white hetero males have taken a steep dive and likely will be phased out in a few years, replaced by manufactured semen that is free of defects, and the gender balance will be adjusted to 90–10, women to men, making for a more peaceful and sensible world, with a few million WHMs kept around for heavy chores, a militia, basically a class of serfs with no legal rights, and women will look back at our era of WHM dominance as an absurd extension of the Middle Ages, though one hopes they’ll remember a few of us such as Michelangelo, Mozart, Abe Lincoln, Babe Ruth, that whole gang, and meanwhile, I myself, thanks to a cardiac procedure called ablation that didn’t exist when I was your age, have had my life extended by who knows how long, which goes against the trend of white hetero obsolescence, and how can I justify this miracle? I feel resurrected, but what to do with it? Did I win this privilege unfairly? Did I jump the line? I was dragging my feet, ready to enter retirement, dementia, and the nap in the dirt, but now apparently I am supposed to do something worthy of this amazing blessing. But what?

Maybe writing these dinky essays about the buzzing of the bees in the cigarette trees is no longer good enough. By rights I should master electrocardiology and do for other people what was done for me but I struggle to deal with a waffle iron let alone a defibrillator and I didn’t even get to witness the brilliance and proficiency of the cardiologist and physiologist who did the job, I being deeply anesthetized at the time so as to keep me from trying to amuse them while they were performing the transformation.

What I come away from the procedure realizing is, first of all, the inadequacy of the word “procedure” to describe something that gives you more time in this world of marvels. “Procedure” is good enough for clearing a paper jam in a printer, but what was done for me was miraculous. Thanks to scientific wizardry, I am now, in effect, walking on water.

What I also come away from it with is an appreciation for professional kindness. I was fully awake when they wheeled me back to my hospital room and I remember clearly the nurse saying, “We’re going to slide you onto your bed, my friend,” and they did, and a moment later, she said, “I’m going to have a look at your groin, my friend.” The wire they run up to your heart to change the arrhythmia goes up a vein in your groin. So she checked and the wound looked good.

In the comedy biz, which I dabble in now and then, a woman examining your groin could lead to truly dreadful jokes, but thanks to the words “my friend,” I didn’t utter a word. I was dazzled by her kindness. Nurses are highly skilled professionals, but the addition of “my friend” was a beacon in the darkness. I was semiconscious in an enormous hospital in the biggest city in America but the grace of “my friend” made me feel that my humanity was recognized, even in the mists of post-anesthesia when one has the intelligence of a tree toad. She pulled the sheet back up and then she took her hand and brushed the hair out of my eyes. The kindness of this gesture was deeply moving. I feel tears in my eyes as I write about it.

So I’m not going to go into electrocardiology, but I am intending to practice kindness. I insisted that my dear wife go to Florida with her sister as planned and not fuss over me. She went and is having a fine time, which makes me happy.

When two guys have gone up your vein to your heart and fixed the flutter, you should put aside your mournful mortality and enjoy the gift. My friend brushed the hair out of my eyes and a moment later she brought me a small plastic container of applesauce. It was the Monet’s Garden at Giverny of applesauce, it was Chopin’s applesauce étude “La Tristesse,” it was the Aristotle Contemplating the Blast of a Grand-Slam Homer, it was the sunrise over Venice, it was sauce from the apple Eve gave to Adam, the applesauce of knowledge, and I thank God for it and expect to spend the rest of my days enjoying it, of which now, thanks to science, there will be more. And now let us turn to No. 80 in our hymnal, “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

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A man of the north speaks out

Now that the warm days have petered out and gray November has descended, I look forward to the arrival of winter when Minnesota becomes silent and shimmering and magical just as in a children’s story. It’s like Robert Frost said in his poem, you stop to look at the woods full of snow that belong to a guy in the village and your horse thinks it’s nuts to stop but you do and the woods are lovely, dark and deep but I have a dental appointment to keep and I want to buy a sheepskin jacket, and sheepskin ain’t cheap.

Thirty years ago, winter arrived on Halloween and Duluth got 37 inches of snow and the next day men were out shoveling their sidewalks. It was a beautiful day. And a few months later I met my wife to whom I am still married and vice versa. To me, the blizzard and the romance are closely connected: having faced death, I was ready for love and she took me in her arms and there was a powerful mammalian attraction. She gave off heat, I loved her conversation, I could imagine spending winter with her. The subject of Florida has arisen recently, now that she has family down there, and I have reminded her of the Florida condo building that collapsed. Buildings don’t collapse in Minnesota, they freeze solid.

But she worries about me walking on icy sidewalks. We know old people who’ve fallen and bonked their heads and suddenly were unable to use the subjunctive mood and express wishes or draw comparisons, unable to use the pluperfect and describe something you’ve done in the past, so you’re trapped in the present indicative, which is hard for an older person. Pluperfect is our home.

I have nothing against the idea of warm weather, except as it may indicate global warming that will trigger apocalyptic events that will cause great suffering to our great-grandchildren and their children. Ordinarily, I enjoy a warm summer day as much as the next person but then, sitting on a porch, looking at trees, I think, “Why am I not happier than I am right now? Where is the stunned wonderment, why am I not writing a psalm or a rhapsody?” Autumn is the same. It brings memories of college years when I imagined I was brilliant and now I am old and dull and the high ambitions of my youth are long vanished in the dust.

But when blizzards come along and hazardous driving warnings are issued, a man comes to life. A switch clicks deep in the brain. Now we have something serious to deal with. Survival. Nature is trying to depopulate us. A deep chord is struck in a man’s heart. We put aside Christianity and go back to our pagan origins — the Bible takes place in a warm climate, Jesus went around in sandals and light raiment. “Love thy enemy” is okay in July but not now. A pack of wolves threatens our tiny arctic village and we must fight them off with clubs. A vicious pterodactyl has emerged from the forest and we must find large rocks and aim the catapult. We the Keepers of Civilization are under attack and all our qualms disappear in a flash. We venture out into the howling storm to bring home pizza for our babies, we reassure them that Daddy is here and nothing bad will happen.

Warm sunny weather depresses me. I’m not Italian. We northerners are Lutheran people, even the atheists: it’s a Lutheran god they don’t believe in. Lutherans are stoics, we take pleasure in hardship, that’s why so many went into dairy farming. And the low point of our year is the summer vacation.

As I write this, I’m alone and she’s in Florida, visiting her family and I dread getting the phone call that begins, “I saw the most wonderful house today. It has a screened porch and a swimming pool and the loveliest eucalyptus trees in the yard. I’m sending you a link by email. Take a look at it.”

If she does, I’ll drop the phone, wait a half minute, pick it up, say, “I’m sorry. I tripped on a power cord and banged my head. I think I’m okay. Who did you say this is?” A man uses whatever weapons are at hand. Disability may be one of them. If I could remember the subjunctive mood, I’d wish you’d come home, my darling. You belong with me.

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Small talk as the instrument of civility

A male nurse did a blood draw on me the other day, and as he tied the rubber strip around my upper arm, I said, “I’ve had this done about seventy times, you’re competing against some of the best, and you know that women are better at it than men. They have the kindness gene. Men are inherently aggressive. In your unconscious mind, you’re stabbing an enemy.” He laughed, a genuine hearty laugh — I’ve been in the business a long time, I can tell genuine from forced — and stuck me and said, “I’m afraid that was only a C plus. You made me self-conscious.” He chuckled.

In my old age, I believe in small talk as the conduit of civility. I got this from my dad who, though he was a devout Christian, loved to pass the time of day with strangers. The dictates of our faith commanded him to witness to them about Jesus and quote “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” but he didn’t, he talked about the weather and cars and his boyhood on the farm and ordinary things. This was curious to me as a kid, his friendly chatter with sinners. It’s still impressive to me today.

The same day I got a COVID test from a nurse, in which she pokes the long Q-tip up the left nostril and into the cerebellum. I said, “You’ve done this before, I’m assuming,” and she laughed. I said, “You probably have dreams about it at night.” She laughed again. Up went the Q-tip and I flinched and she said, “Sorry, it’s harder to give it to tall people,” and then I laughed.

I’m from an innocent time when people made small talk with each other, no matter who. In these times, when identity — race, gender, sexual preference — is on everyone’s mind, we hesitate. But so much of civility in America is in the form of light-hearted small talk, in passing encounters with strangers, you say, “How’s your day going so far?” and the stranger replies and you make a moment of it. Life is hard, winter is on the way, the kids are driving us crazy, but you and I, friend, are comrades in the quest for meaning and the struggle to get by.

And so, heading off in a cab to church on Sunday, I notice the driver’s last name, Rivera, and think of Bombo Rivera, the Twins center fielder, and a song I wrote about him (“All the men love Bombo because he loves to play, and all the women love him cause his name ends in E-R-A”) but this is New York and Bombo was back in the Seventies, long before the driver’s time, but I say, “That Series game last night was sure worth staying up for,” and he said yes and mentioned Rosario of the Braves who was a favorite player of mine when he played for the Twins. “He’s from my hometown in Puerto Rico,” said the driver.

And there you have it, a magical connection. Eddie Rosario is a great player to watch, a clutch hitter, known for his tendency to swing at the first pitch, and in the eighth inning the night before he robbed Houston of a double with a dash to the left-field wall and an amazing backhand catch that you had to go online and click the replay six or eight times to believe. And then he trotted, cool as could be, back to the dugout.

The driver had never been to Minnesota but he knew Rosario had played there. He asked what Minnesota is like — he’d heard it gets cold — and I said, “The winters are beautiful and the people are very kind.” The driver said he has four children and wasn’t happy with public schools in the Bronx. I wrote their names down and said I’d pray for them. We pulled up in front of church. He asked what Episcopalians are about and I said we believe God loves us and wants us to be at peace with each other. He agreed. I overtipped him.

An amazing catch in left field leads to a moment of fellowship and a statement of faith. I walked into the hushed silence and the Gospel reading was from Mark, where Jesus tells us to love our neighbor as ourself. One way to show love is to talk to each other, even small talk. Thanks for listening.

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A day in the life of an American man

Being almost eighty, as I am, is a source of constant amazement and I would not trade it for the drudgery of being forty or fifty or the sheer stupidity of my twenties. I am starting to get a grip on things. I love home because I know how the shower works but I’m not attached to material things except two, both electronic. I no longer know who famous people are, especially TV stars and pop singers and contemporary authors, and I’m okay with that. I accept that males have become fringe figures with no particular authority in everyday life.

I was amazed to hear a man shout “Taxi!” the other day just as men used to do in the movies, especially big execs and private eyes. It was in New York, at Broadway and 64th, across from Lincoln Center, about 7 p.m. and the man’s cry was full-volume and the cab hit its brakes and stopped. Men in real life gave up that tone of voice some time ago when we took up cool irony and learned to say, “If you happen to hear me, maybe you could give me a lift,” which is a line that can’t be shouted.

I remember, on a movie set, the assistant director saying, “Lights. Camera. Action!” and later “Cut!” and I remember my Uncle Jim getting horses to pull the haywagon with a “Hyuh” and then, of course, a “Whoa!” to stop and I remember train conductors shouting “Board” and making a two-syllable word of it. Now I love to watch baseball so I can see the home plate ump do that dramatic ripping motion for a called third strike, “Steeeee-rike!” I wish I had an authoritative moment or two in my life and the plain fact is that I don’t.

My wife does. She says, “Don’t put your coffee cup down on the table. Use a coaster.” She says, “Turn on the light when you get up to pee at night.” She says, “You’ve been sitting at that computer all day, you need to go out for a walk.” I have no commandments whatsoever. I am Moses with two blank tablets.

She went up to Boston last week and for excitement I went to a clothing store and looked at suits without her there to tell me which one looked good, but there was a saleswoman who saw that I was helpless and she showed me a number of ugly suits, dark plaids and patterns, clothing I’d associate with used condo salesmen or content providers, whereas I am an American author, but I could not bring myself to say, “No,” all I could say was “I don’t know, maybe not.” I was hesitant to take issue with her. Let’s just say it in simple English: I’m scared of women. She touched me once on the arm in a friendly way, and then she did it again. I would no more touch her arm than I’d play with a loaded pistol.

I finally settled on a suit, navy blue — how can you go wrong with navy blue? — but it’s still at the store, getting alterations, so my wife hasn’t seen it, and she’ll leave for Florida the day before I pick it up, and I’ll go on tour for a couple weeks and do shows in front of audiences that include women who’ll look at me and think, “How could his wife let him go out in public in a suit like that?” I can sense the critical glance of women, even in a darkened theater. I don’t care if I offend men — I consider that a badge of honor — but the disapproval of women has always made me shrivel. My aunt Eleanor and aunt Elsie approved of me and on the strength of their approval and that of my teachers LaVona Person and Helen Story, I ventured into the field of literature. In 1985, a woman named Veronica Geng gave me a four-star front-page salute in the New York Times Sunday Book Review and the book became a bestseller. My wife and daughter both think highly of me, as do several womanly pals and my cousin Elizabeth and a few nieces. This is all a man needs to stay afloat.

But I can’t forget the guy who yelled “Taxi!” and the taxi stopped. I’ve been using Uber but I am practicing yelling “Tax-EEE” with the emphasis on the EEE, which is the sound that carries on a busy street, and if I can make a cab stop, I’ll be happy, even more so if the driver is a woman.

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