Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 42

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 I come from withdrawn people, I know how to stifle myself.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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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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