Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 43

The amazing grace of charismatic Piskies

I’ve been skipping the news about Senator Colon Gas of West Virginia lately and his objections to reducing greenhouse gases and I’ve been focused on the pleasures of being an old man, which includes the occasional steak-and-eggs breakfast. An old man must choose his vices carefully and I gave up smoking and drinking when the thrill was gone but if I were offered a Last Meal the night before I swing from the gallows, steak and eggs would be it and possibly (why not?) a glass of Pinot Noir, robust but subtle, moderate tannins, floral aroma, notes of cherry and plum with a slight rhubarb accent, otherwise a bottle of Grain Belt.

I am 79, and this year is a fine year and I’m not just whistling past the graveyard. I feel loose and free and jazzy and Sunday morning in church I fell apart, which is unusual for an old stoic, but the choir sang, “We shall walk through the valley in peace. We shall meet our loved ones there.” And then a jazzy “Amazing Grace” with Hammond organ, and at the end, our sins forgiven, we sang “I Am the Bread of Life” with Anglicans raising their arms up high like Pentecostals on the chorus (“And I shall raise them up”) and I got completely choked up and couldn’t sing, then “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and people clapping to it like Baptists. I come from fundamentalists who avoided rhythmic singing lest it lead to dancing but there was Mother Julie dancing like a cheerleader in the aisle, and I walked home, a pile of emotional rubble.

Someone had emailed me a newspaper article about me and I opened it and scrolled down to the Comments that followed. The old print newspapers had Letters To The Editor, which were signed and polite and the online Comments is a whole new venture of journalism, anonymous and open to malice. It’s like walking into a bar at 11 p.m. when the guys are well-liquored-up and you get to see human darkness up close. I read some real abuse about me, which people would never say face-to-face about my lifelong lechery and cruelty to coworkers and my fake amiability and how much they always hated my radio show, and I wasn’t offended, I was fascinated. I thought, “Why not? I’m only a name to them and a cliché. I went onstage willingly and offered myself to interpretation and fabrication, and these folks are having a good time despising a caricature and maybe they’ll work off their cruelty here and then treat their children with kindness. Leave them be.” People walk up to me and talk about the bond they feel between us and the Comments people deserve to have their say.

We don’t see much outright anger in everyday life, a little honking and silent cursing, otherwise formality prevails, which makes right-wing talk radio so shocking, and there’s the reason my friends and I are so out of touch in our native land. Senator Colon Gas and Leader Kevin McCarthy represent those people who believe they’ve been cheated and put down and their rights stolen. They don’t live in my neighborhood so we’re not in contact. I live in New York, near Central Park, a little paradise where parents of small children have laid claim to large tracts of lawn and hills and dales and playgrounds and families promenade along walkways, pushing a stroller, a toddler or two hanging on, and no cruelty or vulgarity, no threatening behavior is tolerated.

You can blame the anger on a poor upbringing or listening to too much heavy metal or angry theology — over on the other side of town, preachers are telling the faithful that a secular liberal socialist cult is conspiring to steal their country, but I think the problem is simply separation. There is a serious lack of intermingling.

I do believe that if the angry Comments people and the dystopianites had joined us in church this morning and sung “Amazing Grace” and held their arms up to “And I shall raise them up” and clapped their hands to “Lift Every Voice and Sing” it would’ve warmed their hearts and we would’ve shaken hands afterward, maybe even embraced. If I get choked up, then the hardest heart would be moved. He will raise us up. We sang it and I believe it. We need to let our light shine.

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How long, o Lord, how long? Just asking

I am still processing the news that a pig’s kidney was successfully attached to a human and that an animal whose bacon Americans have been using to kill themselves may now be an instrument of healing. Pigs have provided heart valves for people and now kidneys are a possibility and who knows? Maybe knees and hearts and brain tissue.

Donor pigs, of course, would need to be treated with deference. An animal who saves your life you don’t keep in a pigpen and feed slop out of a trough. Donor pigs would live in comfortable condos with clean mud baths and be served individual meals on plates and would be transported aboard buses, not in livestock trucks. This goes without saying. A pig whose kidney might wind up in your body, you wouldn’t feed it on garbage.

I wouldn’t feel odd about having a pig organ put in me, other than the snout or jowls; I’m okay with the idea that parts of us are interchangeable. I am an animal, I know it. Beneath our thin veneer of spirituality and intellect, we are beasts. I’ve been in crowds of humans that exhibited herd behavior not unlike pigs — I think of the crowd at the Metropolitan Opera, pushing through the turnstiles, shoving aside the elderly (me) in their eagerness to witness the heterophobic violence onstage. Nobody has pointed this out before but it’s always an opposite-sex lover who gets stabbed or poisoned, gay men seem to enjoy this, but never mind.

I, of course, know people who have close emotional relationships with dogs. They don’t talk to me about it because I’m not a dog person but I can see it. Some of them sleep with their dogs. I’m sure there are intimate conversations that take place in private. I also know people who imagine they have an emotional relationship with a cat but the cat knows better. I never formed those friendships because my dad was a farmboy and our dog Cappy was an outdoor dog whose job it was to keep foxes from eating the chickens and raccoons out of the sweet corn. He slept in the garage.

Dogs had jobs back then. Lassie rescued small children from quicksand. Rin Tin Tin was part of the war effort. My aunt had a little poodle, basically a pillow who pooped, and Dad knew that she slept with the dog and to him this was a shameful thing, not to be spoken of.

Cappy guarded the garden against raccoons, but now there are leash laws passed so kids won’t be scared of dogs. In my day, a kid learned to handle a strange dog by making eye contact and keeping a hand in your pocket as if you might be armed, but now, thanks to leash laws, raccoons feast on backyard gardens and we buy tomatoes from Yucatán for a dollar apiece that are two weeks old and we’ve lost the pleasure of the homegrown tomato, which, to me as a boy, was evidence of a loving God, but never mind.

The pig research, and other medical advances, are motivated by the urge toward longevity that my generation feels keenly, a desire to venture into the 90s. My grandfathers died at age 73, which probably seemed long enough to them, life being less of a picnic in the early 20th, but my confreres, whom I saw at a class reunion in September, seem rather immature compared to how old people used to be and are eager to see more of the world and if some pig parts would facilitate that, my friends would be agreeable. And the way they shoved into the food line makes me wonder if they’ve had some kidney work done.

To me, the 90s are foreign territory, like going to Eritrea. I never met an Eritrean, I know nothing about the place. My cousin Stanley has just turned 90 and he left a message on voice mail the other day and sounded cheerful and in possession of his faculties and said he and Gloria have been out and about, so I’m considering longevity but I don’t care to be a burden and if I get old and cranky and start repeating myself, I will take the Long Walk Across the Frozen Wastes to disappear in the Aurora Borealis if I should start repeating myself unlike my cousin Stanley. He has turned 90. He left me a voice mail message the other day. He and Gloria are fine.

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Got the autumn blues, put on my walking shoes

I love October and I hate to see it pass so quickly. My love and I ate dinner outdoors last Friday and it felt like the Last Time and as an old man I find Lasts rather painful. I rode the Amtrak into New York from Boston, with that delicious flight in Queens as the train descends toward the tunnel to Manhattan and we’re skimming the housetops like Clark Kent in pursuit of evil gangsters, and I thought, “When will I get to do this again?” and it pained me.

It pains me to see the wave of puritanism in the arts, arts organizations competing to see who can write the most militant mission statements declaring their dedication to Equality and Inclusivity and Anti-Elitism, which tells me clearly that the end is near. Art is elitist because some people are better singers than almost anyone else and some plays astonish and others only fill the time, and if equality is now the goal, then where do we go to experience the extraordinary? Art then becomes ideology, and for astonishment we must wait for the next blizzard or thunderstorm. A Manhattan thunderstorm is worth waiting for, but still.

We have a long haul ahead of us, people. Children dressed up as malevolent beings for Halloween: is this a good thing? I doubt it. November is a miserable month, with elections at which old people will outvote the young and timid school boards will be elected who’ll cut out any remaining art or music education and require history teachers to offer opposing points of view as to the legitimacy of the 2020 election. November ushers us into a season of colorlessness and Thanksgiving, an awkward day when people who don’t like each other anymore sit down and practice politeness, a day that reminds us why “turkey” is a synonym for Flop. Anything you do to turkey is an improvement: stuff it with jellybeans, pour brandy on it and light it on fire — better yet, put some cherry bombs in it and blow it up.

November is a hard month, and then comes the typhoon of commercial Christmas joy that makes the day itself such a letdown, after all the ecstatic families in Best Buy commercials you have to face your own grumpy brood. And then New Year’s Eve and the champagne doesn’t sparkle as it used to, and everyone’s older and the talk at the party is all about health insurance, and then a flood of football games, after which everyone feels concussed, then it’s January and February comes along, which is more or less like moving to Nebraska.

This is why we need to enjoy what little is left of this gorgeous month of October. The cure for the blues, as we all know, is to get outdoors and walk around and pay attention to the world. I prefer city scenes since I flunked biology and don’t know the names of trees or birds or rock formations, but I can read signs and sense the stories of people passing by. I walk along a busy street through the surge of pedestrianism and if a bus pulls up to a bus stop as I approach, I board it, no matter where it’s going, and it feels like destiny — everything I did today was perfectly timed so I’d be there when the bus stopped — and this makes everything magical when I get off — everything was meant to be seen by me — the street preacher shouting something from First Corinthians — the boys weaving around in skateboards — the string quartet playing Mozart on the corner by the coffeeshop — and a dog runs barking and a flock of pigeons rises up, the whooshing of wings.

And one day, unintentionally, simply because it was there, I walked up the steps into a library and a room of long tables with green study lamps and young people studying math and writing term papers on their laptops, no chatter, no video games, all business, the children of cabdrivers and cleaning ladies and the ladies at the nail salon. It was a sacred place, the children redeeming the loving sacrifices of the saints, climbing the steep slope to be lawyers and doctors, and in that room, I felt I’d come to the very heart of the city, what it’s all about. Look no further. The future is in this room, studying. There is hope, plenty of it.

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Don’t know what’s wrong, but it’s okay

I am enjoying being an old man and I wonder why I didn’t get here sooner. There are benefits to being 79 that I would’ve appreciated in my late thirties. I look at the stories on the front page of the paper and I think, “Not My Problem” and the latest NMP is the shortage of goods due to shipping backlogs, freighters lined up for miles waiting to unload, docks piled high with containers, factory production slowed due to lack of parts coming from China, building projects halted, dire situations, workers idle, confusion, dismay — and here we sit, Madame and I, with the opposite problem, too much stuff, need to give it away.

We have about twenty big dinner plates and twenty small plates and when was the last time we sat eighteen guests down to dinner in this little apartment? Not since Jesus was in the third grade. I have eight suits in my closet: when did I last get dressed up? The number of unread books on our shelves would sink a pontoon boat. And why the whiskey glasses? Nobody in this household drinks whiskey. Neither do our guests, they’re all left-wing liberals and whiskey, in case you didn’t know it, has become politicized and is now reserved for patriots who are out to Stop The Steal. I wish they’d steal our whiskey glasses.

Two trillionaires, Bezos and Musk, are trying to fly into outer space but you can get away from Earth quite cheaply simply by heading for 80 and 85 when a person starts to feel himself floating in the clouds, unconcerned with so much of what’s going on, such as those hundreds of cars moving at 5 mph down the distant freeway at 7:30 a.m., honking, angry — what is going on with those people? What’s all the fuss about?

The controversy in Nashville over the need for country music to create spaces of healing and equity for people of all identities and to fight oppression of minority points of view, which sprang up after the first nonbinary musicians were featured on the Grand Ole Opry, was interesting but Not My Problem. I love the songs I love and for me country music hit a peak with Loretta Lynn’s “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin On Your Mind),” which was Loretta’s statement of empowerment and anti-oppression in hopes of changing lives and challenging patterns of discrimination so as to bring about evolution of behavior and clearly stating a moral imperative in order to liberate herself from systems of oppression to bring about a sense of authentic belonging and promoting values of mutual respect as an effective tool for social justice rather than perpetuate a structure of male privilege in daily life and mitigate its effects.

The two nonbinary singers, Morgan Newton and Oliver Penn, are demanding that Nashville issue a mission statement pledging to engage in anti-oppressive and inclusivistic musical storytelling that fights intolerance and cultural appropriation, but the way to change the world isn’t to demand change, it’s to write a terrific song as Loretta did. They say that Waylon Jennings’s “Rainy Day Woman” tolerates a structure of male privilege, and maybe it does, but it’s a great song. You disagree, then go write a better one. The Beatles’ first big hit, “Please Please Me,” was exclusionary and disempowering and built on a structure of exploitation, but their harmonies on the line “Come on, come on, come on, come on” made the song irresistible. “I Want To Hold Your Hand” never considered whether the hand, which presumably belonged to a woman, wanted to be held and the line “And when I touch you I feel happy inside” doesn’t consider whether she (or them or it) feels happy inside. You might be offended by the male privilege that’s made all too clear but the song kept running through your head, including the falsetto “OOOOO” and that’s the power of it.

Anyway, it’s an unjust and inequal and often oppressive world out there, and mission statements come flying like autumn leaves, and nonbinary and non-triplicate and quasi-quadrennials struggle for their share of the sunlight, and in Norway people are killing each other with bow and arrow, and the anger of those drivers on the freeway is almost palpable, and I feel some sympathy for all of the troubled, but only some, not a vast amount. I’m 79 and it’s Not My Problem, people. My problem is this computer, which has a bad habit of suddenly going blank and I’ve taken it to be fixed and they told me confiden

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If you love your work, be sure not to finish it

The life of a writer is a wild adventure you wouldn’t imagine simply by looking at the lonely figure in the black cloak sitting hunched in her/his niche in the cloister, scratching corrections onto the parchment with a feathered quill pen, but it’s true and someone really ought to write about this. At the moment, I am looking at a galley of a new book of mine as sent by a graphic designer named David and I am stunned by the elegance of it, which makes my own words seem almost of classical quality, which makes me want to revise the work to bring it up to the quality of the design, meanwhile my crew of overseers is firing off memos insisting the book be finished by Friday. This is what I’m up against: David’s graphic artistry has shown me how wonderful my work almost is while editors are banging on the door of my cell, threatening to withhold food until I turn the work over to them. It’s ugly.

The book is set in a small town in Minnesota and I feel that a good street fight, an insurrection of farmers versus townsfolk, with a lot of hacking and clubbing and shouting and cursing, would add some interest and maybe also a good gas explosion. I’ve written many novels and never put a major explosion in one and it’s appealing to me now, the chance to have people I dislike file into a building and then blow it up. Terrorists do this all the time, so why not novelists?

It occurs to me, too, that my previous graphic designers were named Butch, Buddy, and Misty, and their surnames ended with -sen or -quist, and David’s name ends with a vowel, same as Caravaggio, Michelangelo, and Fra Angelico, and my literary reputation has been hampered by poor page design and bad taste in fonts. I think that with the addition of an insurrection and a gas explosion I could break out of my reputation for Midwestern nostalgia and be taken seriously by critics for the Times and Post who majored in women’s studies at Bryn Mawr and Smith, especially if the old white reactionaries who stage the insurrection are the ones who file into the building that minutes later goes up in a cloud of flame and smoke, but meanwhile I’m in the hands of deadline enforcement officers who want me to stop and hand over the goods.

Did Dostoevsky work under these conditions? James Joyce? Toni Morrison?

The real problem, however, is not only artistic but also my fear of finishing the book and dreading the onset of leisure time, which, in old age, only leads in one direction, brooding, mental deterioration, half-pound cheeseburgers, and watching MSNBC and Rachel Maddow, which leads to despair for the republic. I’ve spent the past year ensconced in fiction and was very happy most of the time. (I’ve never heard Rachel Maddow use the word “ensconced,” by the way. She might say “hopelessly trapped” or “barricaded” but “ensconced” is too comfy for her and she is not a creature of comfort.)

When the enforcers take possession of my hard drive and publish the novel, minus the clubbing and hacking and the gas explosion, I plan to take charge of my life and announce to my wife, who formerly was in charge of it, “My darling, I’m done with Manhattan. We’ve owned this apartment for twenty years and real estate values are skyrocketing and let’s clean up and move to Portugal.”

We spent a week in Portugal a couple years ago for her nephew’s wedding and we loved it. They are a sensible people, fishermen, farmers, sailors, explorers. When I told the nephew how I admired his wife’s ability to adapt to American culture and make friends and find her way around, he said, “Well, she’s Portuguese. She passes for Parisian but she’s her parents’ daughter.” Her father Antonio is an olive rancher and all-around handyman who stayed up all night dancing at the wedding and then drove us around the olive plantation showing off his trees and talking a blue streak in Portuguese. He is a happy man and keeps busy managing twenty or so unfinished projects. He’s a few years younger than I but he’s my model. I want to settle in his village and go to work writing unfinished novels.

A writer doesn’t need literary prizes to be happy, happiness lies in the work itself, sitting down in the niche with the quill pen and adding a few more curlicues. I am ensconced in my work. I don’t want to lose it and that means postponing publication as long as possible. They don’t teach this to MFA students but they should.

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A few beams of light on our current situation

“Goodness gracious” was about as close as my mother came to actual profanity, that and “Oh fudge,” and now that our daily life is showered with profanity and obscenity, it is no more shocking than dog barks, whereas the words “Goodness gracious” still have (for me) a bite to them, and I can feel my mother’s dismay, which now I feel, hearing about the tidal wave of political narcissism opposed to the idea of social responsibility — Senator Graham was booed and harassed the other day by constituents when he suggested they consider getting vaccinated against COVID — people who deny that the state has a right to mandate vaccination or mask-wearing as a public health measure or enforce speed limits or restrain the sale of weapons meant for combat or the responsibility of parents to send their kids to school, and weird ideas that are being preached from pulpits by ministers who don’t realize that their own people are dying of COVID and in marginal states the plague may be delivering the 2022 elections to us socialists. To raging narcissism, I say, “Oh fudge.”

Nonetheless, I am happy. October has that effect on me and it’s heightened by sunny days and the fact that the suffering of us Minnesota Twins fans is at an end as we go into the postseason and last week we had the pleasure of seeing the plutocrat Yanks squashed by Boston, players who are up in Mark Zuckerberg’s pay bracket and who couldn’t buy a hit or even draw a walk. I am not proud of taking pleasure in the suffering of multimillionaires but it’s a long-standing American tradition. The Yankees’ star right fielder Aaron Judge said, “To me, it’s black and white. Either you win or lose. We lost.” Which, for a guy who could afford to hire a writer, or content provider, is not a memorable line, not even in the ballpark. Casey Stengel who earned a tiny fraction of Judge’s salary said, while managing the Mets, “You look up and down the bench and you have to say to yourself, ‘Can’t anybody here play this game?’” A great line and I’ve thought of it often in my life.

I thought of it a few hours before the game when I tried to sign up for ESPN so I could watch it and I had to use the round clicker on the remote to write. I am a guy from the Three Network era back just after the Civil War when ABC, CBS, or NBC would’ve carried the game and all I had to do was open a bottle of beer, but now I have to manipulate this weird device and after three failed attempts I called my wife on FaceTime and we struggled to get it done and there was some yelling but the marriage survived and I got to see the pinstripe guys slump off the field while the Red Sox danced and whooped and the fans were delirious in the Fenway stands, though surely they knew that this team will likely break their hearts as it has so often in the past.

“Can’t anybody here play this game?” comes to mind when I read about Congress and the debt ceiling hassle and the Republicans’ aversion to talking about climate change even as the reality of it is rather clear and auto manufacturers are planning for electric car production, but Republicans are satisfied with a policy of denial. This is not intelligent but they believe it’s a winning strategy. Goodness gracious. Who are these people? What game are we playing?

With my team packed up and gone home, I’m free to spend October with a light heart. This is the advantage of defeat: the dreadful anticipation of it is over, you got skunked, and you discover defeat is a sort of liberation. But Washington is another matter. The South lost the Civil War but went on to win the 20th century and today we’re living in a confederacy. We have a Confederate Supreme Court and soon will likely have a Confederate Congress. My mother was of a Depression generation that didn’t tolerate narcissism but here we are. But as Casey almost said, “The Democrats have shown me more ways to lose than I ever knew existed. They say there’s always hope, but sometimes that doesn’t always work. But never make bad predictions especially about the future.”

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Lonely guy seeks old café and three buddies

I am an orphan, which is not so unusual for a man of 79, and like everyone else I know, I work out of my own home and at the moment I’m sitting at the kitchen table with a bowl of Cheerios beside the laptop and a cup of coffee (black). I have no office anymore. I’ve had offices, not cubicles but offices with doors and a window, sometimes a credenza, since I was 22 years old. I miss them.

If someone opens a Museum of the American Office, I volunteer to be a docent and I’ll show them around the office of fifty years ago with the mimeograph machine, the manual typewriter, and the big telephone with the long curly cord that went into the wall. There was no copier, we used carbon paper. Someone knocked on the door and I hid my copy of Portnoy’s Complaint in the top drawer and a woman poked her head in and said, “The meeting is about to begin.”

That’s what I miss, the meeting. They were like little morality plays, in which people assumed allegorical roles, Dreamers, Realists, Satirists and Strategists, and the outcome was usually to maintain inertia but they were entertaining. I was a satirist in my early years and then suddenly I became the boss and I was surrounded by realists, and at the end of my office career, I became a dreamer and the two women employees listened and took turns being the assassin who points out the deadly reality so not much happened but I was okay with that. The pleasure was in the meeting itself.

We cleared out the office because we didn’t need it, the copier went, the coffeemaker, conference table, the files were packed off to Deep Storage (where we’ll all wind up someday), and we went home.

Electronics made the office redundant, no need to be combed and suited up by 9 a.m. I imagine the Oval Office may be only a ceremonial room and Joe, though still the most powerful man in the world, may be working from his breakfast table in his T-shirt and pajamas like me. Maybe the Supreme Court will decide to go on conferring by Zoom, the justices at home in their judicial bathrobes.

But I miss it, those friendly Good Mornings as I, Mr. Boss Man, walk in. My wife says Good Morning but sometimes she also says, “You really need to do something about your hair. And your eyebrows. My gosh. How do you see through those things?” My employees never said that.

So now I sit at a laptop at my kitchen table, still in pajamas at noon, and I compose limericks like:

The poet Sylvia Plath
Suffered depression and wrath:
The day that she dove
Headfirst in the stove,
She should’ve just had a hot bath.

A man doesn’t need a staff to sit around a conference table and help him write five-line limericks. But it’s lonely and there’s a loss of status. When you can no longer say, “I have a meeting at the office this morning” people put (Ret.) after your name, and I don’t want that. I’ve thought of about getting myself a psychotherapist just to have someone to meet with and talk about stuff but I’d be trying to amuse her, which is my line of work, and she’d be probing for the dark dank cellars of my unconscious though there truly are none, I’ve looked, and my unconscious has no basement, it’s a solid concrete slab, nothing mysterious about it. I have friends who are in the therapy business and they listen much too closely and the way they say “Hmmm” and “Oh really?” makes me uneasy.

So I’m trying to get together some men to have lunch with. I’ve got one guy, a former Republican, formerly in the investment biz, a guy who turns to the sports page first thing every morning. He’s perfect. Now I need to find two more sort of like him. I’m a Democrat so I’d like a Republican and maybe a guy who knows about science. Race and ethnicity don’t matter. Two guys over forty. Nobody in the arts. If we met this morning, I’d look through my enormous eyebrows and tell about two lively small towns in Pennsylvania I saw this weekend, Sellersville and Jim Thorpe, and how walking around in them made me love this country more than ever. Someday I’ll find my group. Oyster stew and a grilled cheese. Coffee. Looking forward.

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On Tuesday it all came down at once

The world is turning wondrous again, maples and ash and goldenrod turning golden Van Gogh colors and I got into a weepy mood on Tuesday, which is unusual for me, a man with dry eyes, but I was overwhelmed by everything happening at once, thinking of an old friend and sweet singer who’d died, and on Tuesday a reunion of my Anoka high school class (1960), feeling kinship to old rivals and antagonists but now we’re all in the same boat, a sinking ship. The names of some of our dead were mentioned, including Henry Hill Jr., a star athlete and a good guy who enlisted in the Army and made first lieutenant and was killed in action in Quang Ngai province in 1968, leading his unit of the 11th Light Infantry Brigade of the Americal Division.

The woman who spoke of Henry remembered a few lines of a song I wrote about him, “His picture’s on the piano in a silver frame and his family weeps if you speak his name. In ’68 he went off to the war and now he’s forever 24.”

And then that evening I opened my phone to find a picture of twin baby girls born the night before in Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon, to my nephew Jon and his wife, Hieu, two sleeping infants tightly wrapped with little skullcaps, arrived by C-section. Each of them has two names, a Vietnamese and an American, and the plan is that they’ll have a Vietnamese childhood and then come to America to start school. Vietnam is in lockdown to control COVID and so their American grandma can’t go see them but she can study them on FaceTime all she likes.

It was too much for one day, so I sat and wept, remembering that I was not a good father — I never wanted to be one — I only wanted to go down to the lonely sea and the sky, and all I asked was a tall ship and a star to steer her by. But Suzanne took me down to her place by the river and the sight of her turned my brain matter to Jell-O and I touched her perfect body with my mind and instead of the white sail’s shaking and a grey dawn breaking suddenly I was eating breakfast with a lady with a basketball under her nightgown who was nauseous and held me responsible.

A lot for one day, to see up close the ravages of old age and remember the tragedy of Henry Hill and then to see these beautiful sleeping infants in Saigon, the center of one of our country’s two disastrous wars of my era, children of parents born after that war ended, and all this coming at a time when I, along with most people I know, am fearing for the future of our beloved country for which Lieutenant Hill’s life was taken: the heart breaks, it simply does.

Henry is remembered not for his athleticism so much as his openhearted friendship with everyone he knew. He was a Black kid in a very white school and kindness was in his nature. He would’ve been an excellent daddy, but he put on the uniform and followed orders and was killed soon after arrival. And now these two infants lie sleeping who someday will come to America and pledge allegiance and learn to play basketball, maybe ice hockey, and maybe they’ll come to love jokes and cheeseburgers and one day sit beside the Mississippi and if I’m still around, I’d sing “Shall we gather at the river where bright angels’ feet have trod” and then maybe “I got a feeling called the blues, oh Lord, since my baby said goodbye. Lord, I don’t know what I’ll do, all I do is sat and sigh” so they get to hear both sides.

I looked up the song I wrote long ago; the last verse is:

I’m older now and bitter today
At how our country has lost its way
But the young ones coming, I hope they will
Redeem the faith of Henry Hill.

It’s a large responsibility to put on two infant girls and their parents but I do. My classmates and I are united by our mortality and the young are united by possibility. We have learned nothing from history; the little girls will grow up free of our history and I pray they find their way to the shining river that flows by the throne of God.

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Last night I went to sleep by my girl

My friend Lynn, a personal trainer, has given me a list of twelve useful exercises to strengthen the core muscles and improve the sense of balance and I’ve been thinking about doing them, meanwhile I’ve been concerned with other matters, such as which came first, the can or the can opener. This question has no relevance to my life or yours and yet — what is the relevance of relevance at this point in my life? I need questions to answer, otherwise I lie in bed at night with a song repeating in my head, such as “Please Please Me” or “When They Ring Those Golden Bells,” both of them infectious. So the question of can openers is how I spare myself from thinking “Last night I said these words to my girl.”

The answers to all of life’s questions are on the internet and this is why I don’t get out and walk. Things I might’ve had to walk to the library to find out are in my computer on my desk. So here I am. An English merchant named Peter Durand invented the can around 1800, which made it possible to preserve food aboard ships for long voyages. People used knives or other sharp instruments to open them until 1858 when the can opener was patented. This probably saved a great many sailors from stabbing themselves in the hand, which, in those primitive times, probably meant serious infections from bacteria on knives also used to gut fish and shuck oysters. Some galley crew, opening cans, probably lost a hand to a fish-borne disease and replaced it with a hook and thereby became pirates and wound up being hanged. Mothers grieved for them back in Yorkshire and Liverpool. Then the can opener came along and piracy went into decline, shiploads of immigrants sailed unmolested to our shores, the Industrial Age began, slaves were emancipated, the automobile was invented, radio came along, and the 20th century, without people having to jab holes in cylindrical containers.

Thomas Keillor sailed over from Yorkshire in 1774, before the can was invented, a five-week voyage to Halifax, and Lord knows what the family ate: ships in those days assumed, in stocking provisions, that a good number of the passengers would perish at sea, but the Keillors persisted, hardy country folk, Christians, and we persist to this day.

When we took a long car trip out west, we carried a box of gospel tracts titled “The Wages Of Sin Is Death,” which we rolled up and wrapped in gold cellophane and threw out the window at rural mailboxes for people to read and be converted to Christianity but Dad drove very fast through North Dakota and Montana so as to avoid the expense of an extra night in a motel for six kids and two adults and this made accurate bombing impossible and it dawned on me that Christianity is the prevalent belief in that part of the country, the Buddhist population of North Dakota is rather slight, and so I gave up evangelism though other Keillors persist.

On Saturday I went to a Lutheran funeral in St. Peter for a dear childhood friend and we stood around the grave and sang a cappella “How Great Thou Art” and “Till We Meet Again” in Mary Lee’s memory, and I remembered the last time I saw her in St. Peter when she told me a story she’d heard me tell on the radio about a hundred-pound stone plaque that fell off the façade of a building almost hitting Bud Mueller, who had just stopped and turned because Mrs. Burkert mistook him for her daughter Donna’s boyfriend Merle. Mistaken identity saved his life. So when Merle was killed in a car crash, Bud married Donna and did his best to make her happy. I had forgotten the story and Mary Lee remembered it.

I once saw an MRI of my brain and the damage a couple strokes did to it but I still remember her and her sister Margie singing duets and I remember my boyhood home, the big garden out back, the old dog who guarded it against raccoons. We had hundreds of jars of canned food from the garden in shelves in the laundry room so we seldom needed a can opener, you just pried the Kerr lid off the Ball jar and there was the corn and green beans. And Saturday night I could hear the two of them singing, “By his counsels, guide, uphold you, with his sheep securely fold you,” and their mother, Leila, at the piano. A good memory to go to sleep on.

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The story of my life: revised version

I’ve bought many copies of Mary Oliver’s poems, Devotions, and on Friday I gave away the last so now I’m ordering more. I gave it to a friend whose description of brushing his dogs’ teeth reminded me of Oliver’s description of a grasshopper sitting in her hand and eating sugar, the jaws moving side to side, not up and down.

He said he uses a finger pad with bristles and a beef-flavored toothpaste and the dogs tolerate it well and the brushing spares them dental miseries so it made sense. Oliver carefully describes the grasshopper chewing and washing its face and flying away and then —

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention …
how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Paying attention is what Oliver does in her poetry, it’s what her poems are about, walking out in the natural world and seeing what’s there. Unlike most poets working today, she doesn’t write about her own troubles. She writes:

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on …
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination.

I came across an Oliveresque passage in a journal of mine from when I was 12, standing one September evening after dishes were done, behind our house, under my dad’s apple trees, and my mother at the piano playing “Abide with me” and I wrote:

Abide with me, another autumn day.
Night falls, the sky fills with the Milky Way.
An old piano, golden apples and
Dishes are done, my dog’s nose in my hand.

It’s a sweet little souvenir of a September evening in 1954, north of Minneapolis, and a boy wanting to preserve the wonder of concurrence, the hymn, the stars, the apples, the dog’s cold wet nose. He declined to draw any conclusion or to bring himself into the poem. Below the poem he notes that the word “racecar” is the same forward or backward.

Years later, I’m sitting in a steakhouse, hearing about brushing dogs’ teeth and thinking about Mary Oliver’s grasshopper while ten feet away eight drunks in their twenties sit around a table, having a wonderful time being stupid and very loud.

I don’t think I’ve been loud often in my life, but I’ve certainly been stupid. Once I got myself a cabin in the woods of Wisconsin with a separate workroom, 10×15, on stilts, with a stove and a big window looking into the trees, no house or road in sight. I sat at a table looking out the window and it was startling, when a deer walked out of the underbrush or a bird flew by. Shocking once, when a porcupine stopped and looked up at me.

I am not Mary Oliver, however, and don’t have the patience to think about a porcupine and design a poem around him (or her, I also don’t recognize gender except for deer), and I am not a birdwatcher. I was working on a book, The Book of Guys, and none of the guys was a hunter or hermit or forest ranger. And after a year I concluded that peace and quiet made me uneasy. A porcupine is interesting for a few minutes and maybe if I were looking up at the stars and smelling apples as someone played the piano and a porcupine put his nose in my hand, I could get a poem out of it, but poetry isn’t my line. Sorry, I’m a money writer.

And then I met my friend who became my lover and she was a New Yorker and I abandoned the cabin and workroom and we married in 1995. She is a daily walker but prefers Central Park with its great variety of humanity. Out of mistakes comes happiness. We gain good judgment by exercising bad. Had I made the enormous mistake of buying myself a dog, I might’ve been comfortable in isolation and I’d still be there today, a cranky bachelor, unvaccinated, not brushing its teeth or my own, listening to Fox, with twenty “Keep Out” signs posted, a pile of hundreds of empty Jack Daniels bottles, and a couple of loaded AK-47s by the door. I much prefer talking to you than listening for intruders. Thank you for that.

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