Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 45

In defense of feeling good in perilous times

I am thinking about moving to Texas so that I can be in open disagreement with the powers that be and express this freely, instead of living in colonies of liberal progressives where I must put tape over my mouth except when among close personal friends. Freedom of speech is watched closely where I live and we all know it. “What exactly is it you want to say that you can’t?” you wonder. It is something that, were I to say it, I’d be kicked out of the Democratic Party and my library card would be confiscated and I’d be barred from Amazon and Starbucks and the Episcopal church would make me sit in the Penitents’ Corner. So I’ll keep it to myself.

I grew up fundamentalist so I’m familiar with the drill. We couldn’t join marching band because we believed that rhythmic movement would lead to dancing, which then led to fornication. We never sang uptempo hymns, only dirges. Women kept silent in church because the sound of their voices would lead men to think impure thoughts. So the rigidity of progressive righteousness is familiar to me. I can live with it. I know which friends can be trusted and which cannot.

Anyway, it’s been lovely weather and my family is enjoying robust health and my novel is finished and we escaped from the nightmare of Ikea, a vast warehouse of a store designed by psychologists to disorient the shopper. It’s popular among liberals who wish they were Swedish, everything is tasteful, there is a great deal of whiteness, everything is white or natural wood, and I suppose if you live with Swedish furniture and tableware you feel less complicit in our shameful treatment of the disadvantaged and our corruption of the planet, but the place makes me insane, wandering lost through the puzzle of aisles, and, handsome though some of the furniture is, it requires self-assembly, which would drive me straight to the brink. A list of directions makes me look for a gin bottle.

Back home, I sit peaceably at a table under a painting of prairie skyscape, flat foreground, power lines, and a vast expanse of cloudy sky. I bought it at a gallery in St. Paul and it’s more and more appealing to me for reasons I can’t describe, which is true of great music, it is inexplicable and expands with time. Such as the Chopin piano études. I didn’t grow up on them, my mother played hymns on the piano, and back in my rocknroll days I looked on Chopin as music for social climbers, upper-class wallpaper, and now it speaks directly to me and not only the popular ones like “Tristesse” but all that I hear, which, thanks to YouTube, are at my fingertips. In its inimitable way, YouTube is likely to stick a commercial for weight-loss pills in the middle of an étude, but it matters not, this sickly Polish romantic offers an emotional bond that I seldom feel with songs of my own generation. They are souvenirs of a time past and I don’t need them.

I listen to Chopin and look at the woman sitting across the room and the music speaks of our years together, grievous times and strange episodes and endearment and harmony and all of it wrapped in love and kindness. The music passes between us without my having to say a word. If I were to write about our romance, it would be pale and self-serving compared to how Chopin treats it. The world rages around us and some people berate us for not being as angry as they are, but I sit here under the painted prairie while Chopin pours out his story, which is all the more powerful for having endured almost two centuries.

Great art endures and the souvenirs fade. Mary Oliver’s poem about the grasshopper who lies eating sugar in her hand, its jaws working back and forth, its enormous complicated eye gazing at her, and then spreads its wings and floats away: she writes, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?” And James Wright’s poem about meeting the two Indian ponies in the meadow near Rochester, touching the long ear of one who has nuzzled his hand: he says, “Suddenly I realize that if I stepped out of my body I would break into blossom.”

If you look at the painted prairie, imagine the grasshopper in one hand and the pony’s ear brushing the other, while listening to Chopin, it makes for the launch of a beautiful day.

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A modest proposal sure to be rejected

The sheer ferocity of Ida, high winds, buckets of rain, flash flooding in New York City Wednesday night, rivers and waterfalls in the subway, made millions of New Yorkers think about the advantages of settling in rural Minnesota, especially as more hurricanes, even more brutal than Ida, are forming over the climate-warmed water of the Atlantic. There is a limit to how much punishment people are willing to accept before they look around and consider greener pastures and meanwhile, in St. Paul, people thronged to the State Fair, devouring cheese curds and bratwursts, admiring the livestock and enjoying powerful centrifugal experiences. Facts are facts. If what it means to live in New York is to ride the subway into a waterfall, maybe it’s best to be less stressed in the Upper Midwest and instead of flooded tunnels and tornado funnels, take sanctuary on the prairie.

We have some snow here but it is not catastrophic. I speak from experience. Snow falls gently and does not harm anyone. When the Weather Service says, “Minnesota was hit by a blizzard,” the verb “hit” is fanciful, like being “struck” by a bluebird feather or being “attacked” by ants. When snow falls, we don’t hide under the bed, we don’t need powerful pumps, there are no dikes to prevent snowdrifts. We enjoy a blizzard, standing in the kitchen, drinking coffee, and we feel grateful for having teenagers in the family who will shovel the sidewalks. Bob Dylan shoveled snow, Amy Klobuchar, Jessica Lange, Prince, Jesse Ventura. It is a life-shaping experience.

When a city is flooded by tourists over a long period of time, as New York has been, they turn the place into a cartoon, and the last time I walked down to Little Italy, it was no more Italian than Domino’s Pizza or Venetian blinds or your aunt Florence. Nobody in Brooklyn speaks Brooklynese, it’s all gentrified. The press came down hard on Mets fans booing their team, one more sign that New York is turning into Seattle.

Americans enjoy having some foreignness around for variety and color and that’s what makes Texas appealing to so many people. You can freely enjoy peculiarities there that would make you an outcast elsewhere. For some reason, our Southern states tend to encourage the outlandish, which is why Mr. T moved to Palm Beach: he fits right in. New Orleans puts on Mardi Gras for guys who like to wear wigs and feathers and high heels. A country needs to maintain places where standards of normality are fairly loose. Sturgis, S.D., for example. Cambridge, Mass.

Minnesota never had a French Quarter and the French persons I know who’ve come to visit didn’t seem interested in starting one, but we’re in need of diversity and when the State Fair ends in a few days, I propose turning the Fair’s grounds into a Persian Quarter and resettling some of our Afghan allies there who are floating around, looking for a home. The grounds are unused except for ten days a year, a neighborhood with streets, barns, arenas, shops, parking lots, all it needs are houses. In the Persian Quarter, the refugees could re-create what they love of their culture, and Americans weary of the Walmarts and work cubicles could travel abroad in St. Paul and find exotic style and fabulous cooking. Resettlement could be redemptive, showing that the bearded bullies with ammo belts don’t represent the best of a people. Art and learning do, and folk tradition, and the bonds of language, the food, the music and poetry. Leave religion to personal preference and enjoy the rest.

New Yorkers saw horrendous scenes of subway tunnels turned into raging rivers, trains pulling into the 28th Street station under a Niagara of water, passengers dashing to safety. We don’t have that in Minnesota. Summers are quite pleasant here except for an occasional tornado. The culture is predominantly northern European, white, judgmental, and we’re eager to escape that and New Yorkers would be welcomed here. We tend to be soft-spoken, self-deprecating, compulsively passive, and I know of numerous New Yorkers who’ve found happiness here. Their honk and brassiness are admired here. Back home they were nogoodniks and here they’re heroes. It’s a big country. Check it out.

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The road to contentment is sitting right here

An old pal is locked up with COVID this week and another pal is dealing with QAnon relatives who think liberals are vampires and another pal is suffering anxiety about having ringworm infestation, which his doctor says he does not have but he lies awake at night worrying and has been put on antianxiety medication, which doesn’t help all that much.

I’ve never suffered from anxiety, I don’t know any QAnon people and I don’t have COVID, so I am going to skip complaining today. I’m old and out of touch, and, as the old gospel song says, “This world is not my home, I’m only passing through” so what is the point of complaining, it’d be like going to Vladivostok and asking people to please speak English, or going to church and when the usher comes by with the collection plate, putting in a twenty and asking for a whiskey sour. Wrong time, wrong place.

I am a lucky man and these are wonderful times and we are all fortunate to be living now, in September of 2021, and of course there is poverty and disease and suffering and ignorance and cruelty and crabby people and inferior food and lousy service and poor Wi-Fi and unruly children and robocalls trying to sell you aluminum siding and this cursed printer that says there’s a paper jam though there is not, but there are beautiful advantages that our elders didn’t enjoy, and let me be grateful for the anti-seizure medication and blood thinner that keep me chugging along and YouTube, which has just now, for my benefit, played Don and Phil Everly singing “Let It Be Me,” and all it took was googling a few words and there it is, tender brotherly harmony.

We didn’t have cellphones back in the day and now we do, and so, as the Everlys sing and the GPS lady guides my wife through a maze of colonial streets in small towns on the coast of Connecticut, I can text my daughter and tell her I love and miss her, all simultaneously, and wind up at a nearby café overlooking Long Island Sound.

The most wonderful thing I have today that wasn’t available to me before is old age. The TV offers us dozens of channels, each with hundreds of shows and movies that we could access at any time, and the phone in my hand offers every streaming music format known to man, any radio network, a choice of thousands of podcasts, puzzles, news headlines, books on Kindle — we could be thoroughly entertained for a thousand years and I decline. There were a couple decades when I traveled more or less constantly and sometimes I’d go into a men’s room in some faraway airport and think, “I was here two or three years ago.” Now I’m happy to sit and look at the boats moored at the dock, a red light flashing at the end and Jay Gatsby on his nice lawn across the Sound looking over and envying us.

There is vast personal freedom to choose from the catalog of gender, hair colors, neuroses and syndromes, conspiracy theory, tattoos. Back in my day, only the men who ran the carnival rides had tattoos, former felons operating the roller coaster, and now young women have Gothic symbols on their backs and thighs and around their belly buttons, and so could I, and I don’t. There are ten thousand options available to me and I choose to subscribe to none, which makes this moment all the sweeter when I sit outside with my love, touching her knee, watching the clouds drift in over the housetops, hearing distant geese.

As they say in Denmark, “Shut up and be beautiful.” I think about the beef taco I had for lunch and the salad with fresh tomato and basil, a very self-accepting cucumber, and a beautiful sliced onion, not a bitter resentful onion but an exuberant one. I think it may have started out as a cabbage but it transferred out of the program, wanting to be a root, and met other onions, experimented with different dressings and finally settled on straight oil/vinegar with ground pepper. A beautiful salad. Who cares about a salad? You do, my dear reader. I know you do. I used to have countless readers and now here we are, the two of us, peas in a pod. Thank you for staying with me to the end.

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A fresh start is a beautiful thing

Kathy Hochul took over as governor of New York on Tuesday and so far as I can see nobody said a single bad thing about her all week. In fact, the advance press was entirely favorable, about her extensive experience in local government, her good work habits, her love of getting out and meeting constituents and hearing their complaints. And, it must be added, nobody complained that she had laid a hand on them in a way that made them uncomfortable. It was extraordinary, a politician nobody is furious at. This is big news, people.

She’s from upstate and so to New York City residents, she is a complete mystery, as a Martian would be or a Mennonite, and this seems like a chance for everyone to get a fresh start and focus on the environment, health care, education, public safety, rather than the inappropriateness of commenting on a woman’s outfit. For years Governor Hochul served as an anonymous lieutenant governor to a man who hogged the stage, sang, danced, conducted the band, a man for whom public attention was oxygen. And then in short order he became a man whom people were thoroughly tired of reading about, or reading about anything that sounded like him, such as glaucoma, homogeneity, or combovers. When she took over, it was a huge relief.

A fresh start: it’s a basic necessity in life. I wake up in the morning, put my bare feet on the floor, and think, “The dumb things I did yesterday, forgetting my credit card at the restaurant, cursing my computer for not accepting my PIN, I shall not repeat today. I was cranky yesterday. I shall be agreeable starting now.”

This is a function of jokes: they’re a way to change the subject. Your dinner companions get stuck on the subject of health insurance and the conversation heads deeper into the actuarial swamp and so you tell the joke about the man and his wife who crash into the bridge abutment and die and go to heaven and it’s beautiful and he says, “You know, if you hadn’t gotten me on blood thinners, I could’ve been here ten years ago.” It’s an old joke but it breaks the gridlock and now maybe we can talk about bridges instead. People get fixated on politics and you’re dying of boredom and you say, “How many politicians does it take to change a lightbulb? One to hold onto the bulb and two thousand to turn the building.”

We need some freshness in politics. The cast of characters has been around half my life, the rhetoric is old as the granite hills, our leaders are phoning it in. The country seems divided 50-50 and so it takes forever to get basic stuff done and the sniping is ferocious and politicians don’t dare exhibit humor in public. Jokes have become dangerous.

I like Joe, he doesn’t lust for attention. He doesn’t wear heavy makeup and he doesn’t pose in front of churches, he actually goes in. Sometimes he sits at his desk and works. If he’s been playing golf, it must’ve been late at night. He’s got a sense of humor because he’s Irish and he’s from Delaware, a state of one million with two U.S. senators, a joke played by the Founders, a poke in the ribs of New York and Massachusetts. He’s a good one-term guy. Not two. We need to turn the page.

Afghanistan was a disaster we inherited from old imperialists and most Americans will be glad not to be reading about it on a daily basis. The Taliban is a bunch of thugs, nobody you’d want to move in upstairs, and they captured the flag, and now it’s their problem. If they want to restore the Middle Ages, good luck, but all of their best people are trying to escape. A Kalashnikov is no substitute for brains.

Kamala Harris has been staying in the background, a wise move, and I can imagine in 2023, after the Democrats survive 2022, Mr. Biden, having accomplished what he can, will announce that he’s too busy to think about another campaign, and Ms. Harris will step forward. As a woman of color, she would have an opportunity to put some bitter issues to the side and lead us into an era of good feeling. My generation is done: throw the bums out and let’s get down to business. If she’s not up for it, maybe Governor Hochul is.

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September, the finest month, is on its way

We got good weather in August, good for a city guy with no lawn, and then a typhoon came to town and a torrent fell last Saturday during a star-studded concert in Central Park where my wife sent me a video of Barry Manilow on stage, whose facelift had destroyed his voice, singing his brains out as lightning flashed to the south which shut down the show, but now the rain has ended and the world feels like September with the smell of apples and possibility in the air and I feel young and indomitable, crossing the street in front of eight beefcakes on Harleys and I feel like saying, “Which one of you cream puffs wants to take on a retired radio announcer?”

We’ve been living small for two years now and the simple pandemic life has been good for us. We switched from Perrier to New York tap water and when we want bubbles, we blow through a straw. We’re done with loud restaurants and the social whirl. I gave my fancy clothes to the Salvation Army and now I’m seeing homeless men in Armani tuxes. But now I need a break and I’m thinking we should rent a house on the coast and do what Emerson said, “Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air …” Forget about memory loss and do some serious self-care. But do I dare suggest this to the boss?

I am married to a professional orchestra musician so I am held to a higher standard than most people, and even now, looking at this column, I see where maybe I should go back and maybe scratch the Harleys, but I don’t, I’m not a perfectionist, I feel it’s hopeless, spending all day rewriting over and over and thereby losing the spirit of the thing like Sir Wally Raleigh who sailed up the Orinoco in search of El Dorado and for all his trouble came back to London to have his head chopped off and instead of a wealthy aristocrat he became a city in North Carolina and a cigarette. My wife has spent her adult life in the string section, where often the players must ignore the wild man waving the stick in an agony of ecstasy and take their cues from each other and thereby keep the symphony from going over the cliff, even as the audience is moved by the maestro with big hair and it is he who gets the standing O at the end, not the oarswomen in the orchestra. So she looks at my desk and says, “Something needs to be done about that,” but I believe great things may emerge from chaos, otherwise what is democracy about?

She came home from the concert in the Park as the storm hit, rain blew against the windows, lightning exploded, and in the worst of the storm, wind howling, the word “apocalypse” almost on our lips, and I quietly suggested we spend a couple days on the coast and to my surprise she said yes. So I wrote:

My darling, you have my devotion,
You set all my hormones in motion,
You’re my dearest friend
And I hope we can spend
Two days overlooking the ocean
And enjoy it together
Regardless of whether
There’s a midweek discount promotion.

I’m a Minnesotan, my formative experience was hoeing corn and mowing grass, which naturally leads to a career of writing sentences horizontally on a paper rectangle. My hero when I was young was Thoreau, a nice guy but a fraud. He wrote a heroic essay about civil disobedience and spent one day in jail and Emerson paid his fine. He sat out at Walden Pond writing beautifully about independence while his mom was bringing him hot meals and doing his laundry. When he said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” he was probably talking about himself.

Now I’m old and my hero is Emerson, who said, “Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is the triumph of some enthusiasm. … This is the one remedy for all ills, the panacea of nature. We must be lovers and instantly the impossible becomes possible.” So the lovers are going to the sea, the sea, her and me, and the great triumph that comes of it is love itself, the chaotician and the perfectionist, we lie in bed holding hands as the breakers roar, and all of you who do likewise, know how lucky you are. It ain’t desperation, it’s respiration.

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The world is not my home but here I am

My favorite word today is “unsubscribe” and I’ve been online clicking it on dozens of emails asking for my cash contributions to their battle in behalf of the good, the true, and the beautiful, which one wants to support, but once you do, your name is transmitted to other righteous causes and now I’m getting appeals from folks running for city council in Omaha and a group petitioning Congress to outlaw the internal combustion engine, the chance of which is less than slight, so I unsubscribe and instead I gave to a soup kitchen raising money for school supplies for indigent kids: how could I say no? A nice red book bag, notebooks, pencils, a sharpener, a ruler, the same stuff I treasured when I started school.

I loved school. I come from fundamentalist people and every year they asked that I be excused from square-dancing in gym class so that I would not be tempted by carnal pleasure, but still they didn’t object to my reading secular literature such as Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. They were gentle people, not like the bearded men with machine guns riding through the streets of Kabul, or the American mujahideen sacking the Capitol in January or Mr. Roseberry in his black pickup parked in front of the Library of Congress Thursday, claiming to have explosives enough to destroy whole city blocks. Finally he had to pee and he surrendered.

Republicans are in control of provincial capitals in Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Utah, but here in Manhattan, we feel far away from the fundamentalists. We have plenty of Orthodox Jews on the Upper West Side but they don’t come into St. Michael’s and try to make Episcopal women wear head coverings. The buses run on Saturdays. Linguini in clam sauce is available in many restaurants. But the collapse of Kabul sends a clear message: liberal values lack the dramatic emotional appeal of faith-based cruelty. Liberalism is weak tea when up against men with rifles who operate on divine guidance. Liberalism is basically neighborliness and it lacks the satisfactions of ferocity.

I’m an old liberal and I do think that America has been spared a great deal of trouble by the fact that so much hostility that might go into terrorism is expended instead on competitive sports. Christians aren’t influenced by the Sunday sermon so much as by the NFL game afterward, the sacking of the quarterback, repeated in slo-mo, his arm up to pass and three behemoths hit him amidships and the helmet flies off and he crumples to the turf, a broken man: thus our lust for violence is sated. The Yankees beat the Red Sox in three straight games this week and thereby satisfied the hormonal urges of a half-million men who otherwise might drive down Amsterdam Avenue in pickups, waving guns, attacking the Red Cross and Red Lobster, running down people displaying red articles of clothing, yelling at people to show their underwear and anyone wearing red gets depantsed. No, it was very civil.

The American heartland was once a hotbed of religious intolerance and then Jim Naismith invented basketball and now in Kansas and Iowa and all through mid-America it has taken the place of Protestantism. If the American military had spent twenty years and billions of dollars building ice arenas in Afghanistan and teaching Afghans to skate and play hockey, the outcome would’ve been quite different. Women’s hockey is a revelation. We old fundies grow up seeing women as Sunday school teachers and mommies and caregivers and then you go see them in helmets and shoulder pads, carrying sticks, and you see that they do not shy away from belting each other hard enough to rattle their molars.

Women are capable of ferocity and once they’ve tasted the pleasures of aggression they do not lie down and submit to bullying. I look at the beards in burnooses holding rifles and ammo belts and I doubt that the Taliban can put the cap back on the bottle now that it’s been opened. The Middle Ages is a long long time ago. While the beards were holed up in the mountains for twenty years, many of those women were studying engineering, learning how to make the wheels turn and the power flow. Some women became ophthalmologists. You need vision, men. Let them help you.

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A suddenly older man scans life’s romance

I turned 79 a week ago and I’m quite satisfied with the promotion. I celebrated with lunch with five friends at an outdoor restaurant under a canopy on a perfect summer afternoon and in memory of my frugal parents I ordered the most expensive wines, and the Lord, who prepares a table in the presence of my enemies, prepared an even better one for my friends, and we feasted ourselves silly. My wife was away, tending to the settlement of the estate of a crazy bachelor uncle, and texted me, “I miss you too much,” a very nice touch. I can’t remember a better birthday.

The best gift I got was the word “disarray,” spoken on the phone by a niece in L.A. Somehow I had misplaced that word in favor of “chaos,” “mess,” “clutter,” “shambles,” but “disarray” is so elegant, it sounds French, like the name Desirée, an improvement over “clutter,” which makes confusion sound trashy. My niece agreed. “It’s what I do,” she said, “I bring glamor to confusion.”

At the age of 79, Less is More. Had someone given me a book, nicely wrapped, it would’ve been a burden, but the word “disarray” was perfect. It implies that once we were in array and soon will be again, as soon as the problem is solved. I was in disarray myself, having forgotten to wear a hearing aid, so I didn’t understand most of what was said and had to pantomime comprehension, which I am good at, having been an English major and sat through lectures about books I hadn’t read. The gentleman on my left, however, was a Lutheran minister — and still is, so far as I know — and he spoke loud and clear, so I was not without company. He is a Dane and in Denmark the Lutheran church has debated whether belief in a Supreme Being should be required for ordination. Richard Dawkins argued against God’s existence, saying that omniscience and omnipotence are contradictory. I believe God will clear this up when we meet Him, meanwhile we live with disarray and pray for forgiveness. In my remaining years, I hope to forgive myself. I feel I’m making progress.

Looking around at the tables around ours, I didn’t see anybody over the age of thirty-five, and sitting there, half-deaf, I enjoyed being alien, just as in Paris I make no attempt to appear French. I seemed to be the only guy on the block who had owned an Underwood typewriter, used carbon paper, had cut the head off a chicken with an axe, been baptized total-immersion, and seen Rod Carew steal home. I felt like a cultural treasure.

Irrelevance is a great blessing. You realize we are not in control. Maybe $88 billion cannot buy a functional democratic government in a tribal country up against forces that espouse cruel misogyny and bribery, and I’m not referring to Texas. So I skip reading the newspaper, preferring not to waste the day in hopeless anger, and instead drink my coffee and write a wedding sonnet for a couple in California and joke with my daughter who is starting a new life in a new city and sit with my wife and enjoy the breeze and smell the hydrangeas. My old heroes are dead and I look forward to new ones. I want a novelist to come along whom I cannot put down. I look forward to Governor Hochul of New York and hope she proves to be tremendous — we are in disarray and sick of reading about it and look to her to be admirable.

Meanwhile, my life gets smaller and smaller. I once was ambitious and now I see that my main assignment is to amuse my wife. This morning I screwed up the coffee and she found a puddle of it on the floor. I come from the era of Hills Brothers Instant and she comes from the era of Starbucks and its successors, the roasters of artisanal beans from a certain valley in Sumatra. This morning, she was disappointed and so I said, “Well, if we need to get separate apartments, it’s okay,” and she laughed very hard at this. She loved her dad, whose name was Ray, and I would never diss a Ray, my plan is to be a ray of sunshine every single morning, so here I am, I can do no better.

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Though interrupted, the writer persists in pleasure

The word from back home is that the sweet corn is not as good as hoped for due to the lack of rain at crucial junctures but I’m guessing the truth is that we expect too much of sweet corn, those of us who grew up with big gardens expect it to be redemptive whereas it is only a grain trying to be a vegetable. My father was a postal worker, a federal employee, not easily moved to rapture, but our sweet corn, which was 30 seconds from stalk to boiling pot, husked en route, made him very happy.

This was why God created suburbs, for the gardening, so that good country people with high standards wouldn’t suffer the indignity of packaged vegetables. My dad would’ve happily planted sweet corn right up to the foundation of the house, no need for grass (we had no cows), but Mother was a city girl so we kept a yard. Dad never bragged about his children but he was proud of his corn: it was the best in the neighborhood. And now, the garden suburb where I grew up is tending toward cellblocks of condos, the very prison life my father sought to escape. Standards are falling all around.

I thought about this on Monday, eating supper alone — my wife at a family reunion in Connecticut — I had cooked three ears of sweet corn, store-bought, days old, microwaved, but thanks to childhood memories, I imagined it was good. It was around 3 p.m. I like eating a light breakfast and a big meal in mid-afternoon, which seems to give me a richer dream life. The other night I sailed a four-masted schooner on Lake Superior and my late brother, who was a real sailor, gazed at me in astonishment as I bossed the crew around, tossing off nautical terms I’d never heard before. To finally win the admiration of my older brother, who due to his untimely death is now eight years younger, is an amazement. The dream was long, very detailed, and I loved it, the body freed from the drudgery of digestion, now devoted to dreaming.

The phone rang as I was husking the microwaved corn. This is a problem with 4 p.m. dinner, the phone rings. Had my wife been home, I would’ve let it go but I thought it might be her so I answered. It was a friend asking if I’d read the magazine article she’d forwarded to me about anthropologists who say that mankind has, not once but several times, come close to extinction.

I said I had not. I said, “I’ve been finishing up my novel.” This is an advantage of being a writer: you always have work to do that serves to get you out of what others expect of you. You are never at a loss for an excuse.

I went back to the corn and the phone rang again, a Connecticut number so I answered and it was a pal who was in a lather about the Times’s coverage of Mr. Obama’s 60th birthday party at his Martha’s Vineyard mansion. Due to COVID fears, the guest list of 475 had been scaled back, and that was the big story — who was out, who was still in — which offended the pal, who is a righteous man, that the Times, at a time of apocalyptic weather and fires out West and the Big Lie about the election and Republican intransigence over the January 6 insurrection, should be so fascinated about showbiz celebrities. “We’re seeing weather never seen before. Republicans act as if it’s 1953. We’re supposed to care whether Jay-Z and Beyoncé are coming?”

I’d read the whole Times story and liked it, mainly because I’m an old man and it’s interesting to read about famous people and see how many of them I don’t know from a bale of hay. Also interesting to see the Times had corrected a misspelling of Stephen Colbert’s name in an earlier edition. When a celeb’s name gets misspelled as Steven, you can hear the bells tolling.

I listened to the righteousness for almost half an hour, quietly eating my corn, mooshing in my mouth to stifle the crunch. When a friend is talking apocalypse, it’s hard to pull the conversation over to sweet corn, so I didn’t try. Extinction is no distinction but I do believe the Lord has prepared a table for us in the presence of our enemies and that there is sweet corn on it and it is a shame not to enjoy it to the fullest extent possible.

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A somewhat interesting column but far from his best

St. Paul put on an excellent parade Sunday for Suni Lee, the 18-year-old Olympic gold-medal gymnast and hometown girl, a practically impromptu but very intense parade, which is no easy thing with no mainstream press around these days and everybody getting their news hither and yon and gun lunatics around who might put your picture on the front page, but thousands of skinny girls turned out along the route and the entire Hmong community, and a good crowd attracts a bigger crowd, and it was very festive. The fact that the mayor was there was of slight importance. Mayors do not draw crowds anymore, if they ever did, they try to follow them.

Suni Lee won all-around gold with stunning impossible routines on the vault, uneven bars, balance beam, and floor exercise, and the fact she is one of us is hard to believe. We Minnesotans are built for stability — agility, not so much. Girls’ basketball and hockey are big, kids with German and Scandinavian surnames knocking each other around. And our culture aims the young toward a B-plus, slightly above average. We hope to be good enough and not that bad. Perfection is not talked about, lest the bar be set too high and someone miss a beat and end up discouraged and disconsolate and fall to pieces.

But Suni Lee brings some fresh heredity to the pool and the newcomer-made-good is a sweet story and it was a fine day. All those skinny girls thought so, all the Sierras and Taras and Karas, Fionas, Madisons, who probably have video of Suni on their phones, and plenty of us old grumblers think so too.

Where do you go after you take Olympic gold? Maybe she’ll get an endorsement contract, maybe a terrific college scholarship to a top school, maybe she’ll be drawn toward medicine or physics or chemistry, courses that demand perfection — why would a gifted gymnast want to sit in the library and churn out turgid term papers about 19th-century English novels? — but I somehow wish she’d take up stand-up comedy, which is what America needs right now, a heroic over-achiever humorist instead of us romantic losers usually drawn to it. She could be a comic whose physical presence is unerring, every step, every shrug and grimace a perfect ten, who takes precise aim at the culture of sloppiness all around us, a comedy routine like her uneven-bars routine, spinning, swinging, flipping, skewering pretense and dishonesty, and shaming the self-righteous. The nation needs it. God help us.

Four of us old grumblers ate lunch on Sunday and touched on the country’s drift into treacherous waters, but mostly it was lively, sitting outdoors under an umbrella at a café in an old part of town where young people like to go, signs of romance around, couples venturing into conversation, feeling their way in the dark. A gaggle of excited grade-schoolers crossed the street and waited for their caretakers to figure out directions on an iPhone, and the friend opposite me, newly retired from a career in primary ed, said, quietly, “I hate children.” I wrote it down on a napkin, below an earlier comment by the friend next to her, who’d managed a couple of dance companies and seen more dance than she cared to remember, who said, “There isn’t anything I care for that much anymore.” And below it was a comment from the gentleman opposite me who said, of a writer he’d known, “He wasn’t what you’d call brilliant but he was a pretty nice guy.” A line to be someday carved into a fake granite stone under my name and dates, so I wrote it down.

Yes, I do take notes at lunch. “I hate children” is a great opening line for a routine but it would only work coming from a soft-spoken woman, not a tall pale male like me. Same with “There isn’t anything I care for that much anymore.” It maybe applies to dance where fakery can go a long way — same in poetry where godawful stuff can win big prizes — but it isn’t true in gymnastics or in comedy. “Close enough” doesn’t count. Seeing Suni Lee running top-speed toward the uneven bars, small slight woman, immovable obstacle, I think, “Sheer bravado is exactly what comedy needs and the nation.” People are dying from dishonesty. When a town comes out to cheer for discipline and hard work and mental toughness, the young woman standing, poised, blinks, then begins her run toward the bars, we’re cheering for a better future.

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Eighty in sight, the life force still with us

I was on the phone with a woman from the bank who was helping me fill out a form online with my name, date of birth, SS number, email address, etc., and each time I wrote something down, she said, “Perfect,” as if I were doing a balance beam exercise. Being on the verge of 80 as I am, a day away from 79, I’m used to being kindergartened by the young. I went to a physical therapist once who said, “Wonderful” when I stood with my eyes closed and didn’t fall over. The message was clear: you’re a burned-out wreck and it’s amazing you’re still mobile. Next stop: Happy Acres.

The biblical allotment is seventy and after that you’re on the down escalator, a drain on the economy, a waste of space, you have little stake in the future and are voting for the past, you’re slowing down and becoming an obstruction. So the young are hinting it’s time to take the long walk across the ice fields and disappear.

Thank you but I would rather not, and anyway the ice fields are melting into enormous swamps and I’d return and track mud into the house.

My justification for living to 80 and beyond is simply this: I am a writer who provides a literary rest stop for people no longer compelled to pore over the news after we got a competent president who didn’t flunk civics. For four years previous, we had to pay close attention, same as if you went to your ophthalmologist who recommended you put Lysol in your eyes and you look at his certificate and see he’s actually an oyster shucker. So you switch to an actual eye doctor and there’s less need for worry. Enjoy yourself.

We live, we learn. An old friend went to the hospital for shoulder surgery with months of rehab ahead of him, all from having tried to put on his pants one leg at a time. His right foot got caught in the skinny jeans and he came crashing down on the bathtub. Skinny jeans are to make a guy look like a bronc rider, not a sanitation worker from the Bronx, pure vanity. I gave them up long ago. Now I’ve decided to lean against a wall while pulling on my pants, a small sacrifice of manly pride to avoid intense suffering. I feel young and limber so long as I’m seated but when I put on my pants, I’m old again. So I’ll make accommodations.

Eventually a drug will come along that makes you feel young but it’ll come at a price: your vocabulary will shrink to a couple hundred words and you’ll be illiterate. It’ll be an interesting choice, aging vs. stupefaction. How big a vocabulary do you need to be happy? Not many words, right? — Sun. Food. Sleep. Coffee. Milk. Don’t. Enough. Goodbye. Delete. Unsubscribe. — What else do you need? I myself don’t need “systemic” or “pandemic” or “cancel culture.” I delete them all.

I’ve gotten fond of the Chinese word “qi,” pronounced “chee,” meaning “life force,” (plural: cheese), which my wife has used numerous times to whip me at Scrabble. It’s a game my mother loved and I was her playing partner. Being fundamentalists, we frowned on games, believing we should take pleasure in the Lord, not in the devices of man, but it was a pleasant way to spend an hour together while inflicting pain on each other, so we did.

I forgot about Scrabble for sixty years, but the pandemic brought it back and my wife and I play it daily, and usually she slits my throat and sometimes I wonder if we’re using a Braille edition and she’s reading the valuable letters, Q,Z, J, K, with her fingertips when she draws them from the bag, but last night I won narrowly, using the life force, and she didn’t say “Perfect” or “Wonderful” when I did, she was a sore loser, which gave my victory meaning, but I told her I love her and she allowed me to sleep with her, as usual. She wears the pants in the family and I put mine on very carefully: as Luther said, here I stand, I can do no other. It’s a fine time of life and I hope Joe is enjoying the big house with the great lawn around it, the office conveniently located downstairs and down the hall.

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