Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 45

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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The good fortune of not finishing first

The fastest man in the world is now Lamont Marcell Jacobs of Italy who ran the 100-meter dash in Tokyo in 9.80 seconds, and bravo for him, but when you peak at 26 you face a long descent into normality. You run that fast and you miss a lot such as the woman I saw as I strolled in the park the other day who said into her telephone, “I was not put on this earth in order to make him happy,” which made me happy to hear, a woman who’d gotten a clearer sense of mission. You find happiness by slowing down. At my age, you know that.

A few minutes later I saw an old man, younger than I, take a spill on his bike and hit the asphalt and was immediately surrounded by strangers asking if he was okay or did he need help. He sat, dazed, holding his right wrist gingerly, and then pulled out his phone and said, “I’m going to call my wife.” Two stories within a hundred meters of each other and Lamont would’ve missed both of them.

You give up the idea of speed at my age because you are slowed down by regret and anxiety and also by dealing with Social Security, whose initials are the same as Hitler’s Schutzstaffel, which is no mere coincidence. If you dial the SS number and get into the arms of their computer, you may feel you’ve been taken into a deep bunker and your wrists are bound to the chair and a 1,000-watt lamp is shining in your face. I called a few days ago to try to replace a lost Medicare card and I spoke my SS number to the computer, which could not understand me though I am a native speaker employed as a radio announcer for many years. “Let’s try again,” it kept saying in a voice like Orson Welles’s and after many tries I was shouting the digits, then screeching them, until Welles said, “Let me find someone who can help you.”

This took a long time. If you call the SS, you should have a book to read, perhaps War and Peace. A woman came on the line who I could tell was wearing a brown uniform with a swastika on her cap. I gave her my SS number and she asked what hospital was I born in. I told her and she said, “That’s not what it says here. You’ll need to call another number.” Let’s put it this way: if Amazon were run like the SS, Jeff Bezos wouldn’t have flown into space, he’d be shooting bottle rockets off his apartment balcony in Seattle. Dealing with SS is almost enough to turn a sentimental Democrat like me into an embittered Republican.

It’s a tremendous accomplishment to be World’s Fastest Man, but what does it lead to? A champion gymnast can join the circus but 9.8 seconds is not long enough to make into a starring act that’ll earn you big bucks of the sort a best-selling novelist would earn, and novelism is accomplished very very slowly.

No, I worry about Lamont. He is celebrating now, getting off his training regimen and enjoying deep-fried calamari and linguini in clam sauce, which soon will make him the former fastest man, which is not the distinction it should be. FFMs have to wait in line at airport security along with the rest of us and are not given preferred seating in restaurants.

This is the tragedy of track and field: it leads nowhere. Ryan Crouser crushed the world record for shot put but in normal life why would you throw a 16-pound ball 76 feet, 8 1/4 inches, you could kill somebody. Eventually Ryan and Lamont will grow old and slow and Ryan’s putting shoulder will ache and they’ll be on the phone dealing with bureaucracy, on hold, miserable, helpless, not like me the novelist. I recognized the voice of the SS woman. “Janice?” I said. “It’s me. We dated years ago, we spent a week at your cabin in northern Michigan. The gorgeous sunsets, remember? I wrote you a sonnet.” She wept. “Oh my god, oh my god. I have your picture on my desk. I’ve read all your books. There’s never been anyone else for me but you. I was put on this earth to make you happy. Your Medicare card will be FedExed to you tomorrow, I promise.” She wanted to fly out and meet me but I said no. The Medicare card is all I want.

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Smoke on the horizon, all’s well at home

I saw a young woman lying stark naked in Central Park the other day and of course didn’t stare but noticed an older man, fully dressed, sitting near her so I figured he was with her and if she needed me she could’ve yelled, which she did not. Where there are people, you’ll find surprises, and sometimes you’ll see solo dancers or a man juggling flaming torches and now a naked woman. I am more moved by the sight of young parents, sometimes they seem detached from each other, one irked and the other anxious. Two brave venturers and it hurts to see them unhappy.

You never get over parenthood, it simply never ends. I was 70 when my mother died and she still worried about whether the stories I told on the radio were true. I went into the comedy line of work because my mom loved comedians and I wanted to please her but still she worried. I have friends whose grandchildren keep them awake at night, friends who gave up religion long ago but who still believe in prayer because what else is there? Your beloved granddaughter has schizophrenia and you, a former atheist, switch to agnosticism so you can say, “Dear God, please look down on Angelina who is living in a bad dream and show her Your love.”

I am not a good father. I never coached girls’ soccer, didn’t read aloud to my daughter, and didn’t explain about menstruation, and yet she loves me lavishly. Her mother was the tough cop, I was the cop who bought Dairy Queens. Instead of instilling an appreciation of Twain and Perelman and Nora Ephron in her, she and I hang out on the third-grade level of mucous and flatulence humor. And yet when she sees me after an absence, she throws her arms around me like little Heidi greeting her cranky grandpa.

This is why I don’t disagree with people who refer to me as a “person of privilege.” It is true that I worked in a scullery and for years arose at 4 a.m. to do a wake-up radio show, but the truth is that my daughter loves me openly and freely and for this and other reasons, I am a lucky guy. I once led three canoes of nine 14-year-olds across an enormous northern Minnesota lake in a thunderstorm, me an English major with no life-saving training, canoes with no life jackets, and we reached the opposite shore. No lives were lost. No parents threatened legal action.

I’ve had close calls. I’ve driven while intoxicated. I once locked myself out of a rental cabin in Utah while naked in a hot tub and walked around the neighborhood with only a blue plastic sheet from the woodpile for a covering and nobody called the cops. Both my grandfathers died at age 73, and I am 79 and feel terrific, thanks to modern medicine. I called my doctor one morning in alarm and said, “I have a large hard growth on the roof of my mouth.” He told me to come over. I did and opened my mouth. I was thinking cancer of the mouth and larynx, major surgery, loss of vocal chords, dealing with depression, perhaps approaching stopped cars in an intersection with a tin cup and a sign, “Former radio announcer now mute. Help me. Thank you.” He looked in my mouth and said, “That’s a torus palatinus. A lot of people have one. If it doesn’t hurt, it isn’t a problem.” He didn’t charge me for the two minutes it took to clear up the problem.

Privileged? Yes indeed, and thank you, Lord. We are vaccinated, my love and I, and our COVID cave is perfectly comfortable. She sits across the breakfast table and reads from the paper about the mounting disasters of climate change, we eat one big meal a day, I work on my book, and now and then I tune in a ball game. We’ve been feasting on salads, which gives me salacious thoughts. What I want is for our girl to FaceTime us and be happy and tell about her day and say, “Make me laugh” and I’ll tell the penguin joke in a soprano voice and she laughs and then she looks around and notices something interesting happening and says, “Could I call you back later?” Six words that make me happy. She is okay and doesn’t need me. All I need to know.

 

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Scribble, scribble, quibble, quibble, ishkabibble

It’s okay by me that the Cleveland Indians will be the Cleveland Guardians even though “Guardian” is a colorless term and they might’ve done just as well with Employees or Tenants. And “Indians” is hardly a slur. I grew up admiring Indians as a boy and trying to imitate them — I had no desire to be a cowboy, I was an Indian, and I can see how my Indianness was a natural step in wanting to be a writer and not a cog in a corporation. To me, then as now, the real insult is the title “vice president.” My Ojibwe friend Jerry uses the word “Indian” freely because, as he says, “There are too many tribes for even an Indian to keep track of.” I’ve never heard the words “native American” come out of his mouth.

It’s fine for the Washington Redskins to rename themselves, and I suggest, thinking of Washington, that Lickspittles would be appropriate or Filibusterers. As for Minnesota, I was never fond of Twins as a nickname but it’s an improvement over Gophers. The gopher is a rodent, a cousin of the squirrel and rat. There are more distinguished rodents, such as the porcupine or beaver, but the gopher is near the bottom of the gnawing order, along with the hamster. No athletic team will be named the Hamsters. Count on it.

My high school took the nickname Tornadoes after the town of Anoka was hit by two devastating tornadoes back in the Thirties, which was a brilliant idea, to adopt the identity of a terrifying disaster, though the football team back in my day was more like a gentle breeze than a tornado. People died in those actual tornadoes and I can imagine their survivors might come forward and demand the nickname be changed, out of respect for the dead, and then we shall become the Gales. I don’t care because I am not and never was a Tornado. I am closer to an Indian.

Words matter, I keep telling myself, but as I get older I feel more careless about them. Thanks to my fundamentalist upbringing, I am unable to use common curse words you can hear on any elementary school playground — I can say them only when quoting someone else, never voluntarily, it feels like I’m chewing someone else’s gum I found stuck to the bottom of a bench in the bus station. But otherwise I’m in favor of looseness. My wife feels nauseated if she hears someone say, “Her and me went to the store.” I don’t.

Back in the day, I was wary of being incorrect, but that was back when girls used powerful adhesive sprays to make their hair look shell-like and now I see girls who do their hair by driving 80 miles an hour with their head out the window and they look terrific. Boys kneel down and kiss the ground they walk on.

But there are language vigilantes roaming the land and some of them carry a noose and know where they can find a scaffold.
A friend who is a Unitarian minister tells me that her church demands that she submit her sermons two weeks in advance “to make sure there are no problems” — apparently, the problem is that she has used the word “fellowship,” which raised concerns on the church board, some members preferring the term “community,” “fellowship” seeming too masculine.

Fellowship is the friendliness of people united in a faith. My Episcopal church has a woman rector and assistant rector and I feel fellowship with them. I don’t feel community, any more than I’d address a male friend as “My good fellow” –– I’m not P.G. Wodehouse, I’m an American.

When liberal New York Unitarians decide to censor their clergy, you know we’re in serious serious trouble. Pretty soon the Freemans and Trumans and Petersons and Olsons will need to degender themselves and then how shall we make Los Angeles not threatening to agnostics? St. Paul will have to change its name to East Minneapolis. And why do we keep the name America, honoring the navigator Amerigo Vespucci who sailed our coasts and thought he was in Asia? Do we know for a fact that the man dealt fairly with indigenous peoples? No, we do not. Out it goes, and Columbia too, and Washington, for all I care.

You kids fight it out among yourselves. I was privileged to grow up Indian in the woods along the Mississippi, just us boys, no grown-up supervision. Nobody tried to make us imagine we were marketing consultants. I’m white now and I accept that but I enjoyed being free at one time.

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Mr. Cool is writing his novel under pressure

The astonishing Collin Morikawa was in the news this week, kissing the British Open trophy, something a man would rather not do with the Delta variant around, not knowing how many hundred folks had touched the thing, but he was excited, having won the Open on Sunday with a four-under-par 66, a 24-year-old Berkeley grad joking with his caddy, cool under pressure. Last year, the PGA, now the British, on to Augusta.

Some people have that coolness under pressure, such as the engineer who was sent to the guillotine but the blade wouldn’t drop even after several attempts so they decided to reduce his sentence to imprisonment but he looked up and said, “I think I see your problem.” Other people get into a tight squeeze and prepare themselves so well for defeat that even if they come through a winner, they can’t enjoy it.

Mr. Morikawa putted beautifully as a crowd of 32,000 watched from surrounding hills. He made a birdie putt on the 7th while the 38-year-old tournament leader chipped into a bunker and chipped from that bunker into the opposite bunker. The kid stood strong.

This, as all of us old coots, know, is the future. Some 24-year-old is waiting in the weeds who will snatch the prize from our tremorous hands and we’ll be forced to grin like good sports and congratulate the little twit when we’d rather strangle him with his bike chain.

I love young people, don’t get me wrong. We hung out with the nephew and his wife this week who are totally cool. My generation never used the word “totally,” we didn’t dare think in terms of entireness. We were “sort of happy,” or “kind of interested,” but we couldn’t commit 100% because we had no reliable authorities on style. I know people who’ve never shown their wedding pictures to the children because the sight of the pastel polyester would make them collapse screaming. The nephew and wife are totally into what they’re into and it’s awesome. We never achieved awesomeness. Awe was what you’d feel if Jesus appeared to you in person and touched your head and made you intelligent, you’d be awestruck, so you couldn’t use the same word for, say, the way someone’s hair looks. But now they do. My young people think it’s “awesome” that I’m writing a novel. I hope so but am not always sure.

I was working on my new novel as I watched the British Open and I could sense a strong field of 24-year-old novelists on the scoreboard as I worked on page 110 of my book and was filling the right margin with a handwritten addition — a popular radio minister is caught in a motel in Omaha studying photographs of young women in thong bikinis and though you can see this sort of thing on any beach in the country, underpants with less cotton than you find in an aspirin bottle, his great secrecy and sense of shame make the deed seem perverse, and he’s kicked out of the church and takes a job at a SuperAmerica pumping gas for elderly customers who can’t figure out how to insert their credit cards — and I sensed that my description of firm ovoid female cheeks had jumped me ahead of a lot of young Berkeley novelists who are dealing in anguish and alienation — and then on 113 I wrote a few paragraphs in which a 24-year-old guy is hitting golf balls on a football field and one strikes a lady’s cockapoo in the flank and this gentle dog, enraged, leaps at the golfer and bites him and its right front claw catches the earring in the golfer’s left ear and rips the earlobe and he falls to the ground screaming and incurs traumatic injury that necessitates the hiring of a life coach named Mallory who teaches remedial life skills such as (1) change underwear daily, (2) make bed, (3) brush teeth. It sounds weird but it’s very believable.

I’m calm but I’m fairly certain I’ve got the National Book Award nailed for 2022 and I’m happy about that but when photographers ask me to kiss the golden bookend trophy, I’m going to say, “Kiss my foot.” Old vets like me don’t do that. I’ll hold the trophy down at my side, very cool-like, like you’d carry a six-pack. “When did you know you had it?” a reporter yells. “I never imagined I didn’t have it,” I’ll say. “When you got it, you know it and it’s awesome.”

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My mystification on the Connecticut coast

A quiet week at my wife’s family’s summer house on the Connecticut River, which sounds fancy but is a cottage full of furniture bought at yard sales. And there, this week, I make a big discovery: even after twenty-six years of marriage, I hadn’t realized the depth of her love of gardening. It was hot and she spent hours weeding a flower bed, three wheelbarrows’ worth, and came back to the porch happy and dripping with sweat.

When I met her in 1992, she was a freelance violinist in Manhattan, a Minnesotan trapped in semi-poverty by her love of classical music. We had a three-hour lunch, I fell in love. Nothing was said about yardwork. But here she was, in 2021, giddy after hours of weeding in the hot sun, the very thing I hated most growing up and so became a writer in order to avoid. I edit; I don’t weed.

The misery of weeding was what led to slavery. In the South, they couldn’t bear to work in the fields in that heat so they bought people in chains and beat them up. Slaveholders were people just like us who liked to be comfortable and that meant making other people hoe the cotton. You realize this on a hot day. The difference between us and the South is that it didn’t stay hot long enough in Minnesota for us to think of hauling people in in chains, but we would’ve done it, given time. But the beauty of love is that it leads you down a long path of discovery whereby you come to understand another person, and here was my love, sweat pouring off her, feeling exhilarated about weeding.

She felt like going to the theater that evening so we drove to Old Saybrook and went to a show at The Kate, a little theater named for Katharine Hepburn who had lived nearby. It was a comedy by the Ephron sisters, “Love, Loss & What I Wore,” and I noted, sitting down, that I was one of a handful of men in the room, fewer than a jury, and the thing got underway, and I sat silent, surrounded by laughing women. A lot of jokes about the emotional ties of various outfits. I met Nora Ephron once, walking along Broadway at 79th Street, and we stood and talked and I was struck by what a kind soul this famous funny woman was. So I’m disposed in her favor. But I didn’t laugh.

About halfway in, the play gets onto the subject of bras and boobs and here the real hysteria set in. Women screeching and shrieking at jokes that, had a man said one at a dinner table, he would’ve been shamed and maybe sent to his room. My wife, who is my judge and jury when it comes to comedy, was laughing. Boobs, the problem of flat-chestedness, the search for the perfect bra: all hilarious to the women around me, material for which a man would be heartily condemned as juvenile.

I got in deep manure once with a limerick I recited on the radio, which I still think is one of my best.

There was an old lady named Jude
Who, imagining her solitude,
In warm weather chose
To take off her clothes
And walk around town in the nude
And old men and rubes
Would stare at her boobs
And think thoughts licentious and lewd
She was eighty, Miss Judy,
And not a great beauty
But O how she lightened the mood.

The emails were brutal, I was accused of “objectification” and a childish fascination with breasts that’s been linked to sexual violence, but here was a roomful of Connecticut matrons laughing their heads off.

I think it was the hot weather that affected them. We are all sinners in extreme heat. You lie awake at night listening to mosquitoes and in the morning there’s no milk for your coffee and something snaps and you put on your mask and go to the store and — Sacré bleu! there’s a pistol in your hand! — and you tell the lady to open up the cash drawer. But this is a small town, and she says, “Oh go home and soak your head, Keillor. You don’t impress me with that little peashooter. Go back to bed and get out on the other side.” An old writer on the brink of felony is saved by the kindness of a neighbor. I’m sure it happens all the time.

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What we crave, above all, is what’s real

The books about No. 45 are coming out and one says he was deranged and another says that his own people feared for the country, neither of which I doubt for a minute, but I’m not up for reliving those years for the same reason I don’t plan to spend January in Norway: been there, done it, life is short, no need for reruns.

The January in Norway is a story my wife tells so much better than I can. I was sick with the flu in a hotel room in the town of Tromsø above the Arctic Circle; she was the one who went dogsledding and ice fishing in the arctic twilight in a cold rain and the sun never shone and the food was gruesome and everyone worked hard to be upbeat and detached from reality, and now when she recites the miseries of that week, people laugh like crazy, whereas I was in bed, mostly sleeping. The trip was my brilliant idea and I missed out on it and her telling of the story is brilliant, epic but brisk.

We have no plans to return to Tromsø. It has served its usefulness as an example of how unfounded enthusiasm combined with loose cash can lead to a dark place.

I experienced vast self-confidence in my twenties, which may have been a necessity for an aspiring writer. I hung out with other young writers, hoping to absorb talent by proximity, same as you’d catch the flu. We met at the Mixers bar near campus and I drank Scotch because that seemed like the right liquor for the writer I wanted to be. And I smoked unfiltered Luckies. What we knew about writers was that they were prodigious drinkers. Eight or ten of us crammed into a big booth and drank while disparaging any and all successful living writers from Bellow, Updike, and Roth on down. The combination of alcohol and disdain boosted our confidence. I imagine there are bands of writers doing the very same thing today. I don’t want to join them, any more than I long for Tromsø in January or want to read a book about Mr. Yesterday.

What I long for is to go back to last Sunday when I had planned to read to my daughter a long passage I wrote about her birth and childhood and how she developed into a big personality, loving, jokey, reading other people’s feelings, keen about details, but events intervened, and then Monday was furiously busy, moving her into a new apartment in a distant city, and then suddenly it was time to go and we hugged and she burst into tears and so did I. I’m not a weepy person. There have been many farewell moments when I should’ve wept and did not. What moved me was the depth of her love for her mother and me, the emptiness of the apartment, the strangeness of the city. “You’ll be fine,” her mother said. My daughter hugged me and wiped her nose on my black T-shirt, which amused her and so she did it again. I said, “Is it snot? No, it’s not.” She laughed. I walked to the door and on the way I passed gas and she laughed harder and then resumed weeping. I went out the door, tears running down my cheeks.

We drove away in grievous silence, my wife at the wheel. I searched the map on my phone for a Dairy Queen, thinking that I deserved a Butterfinger Blizzard but there were none nearby. Since Monday we’ve gotten reassuring texts from her that she’s doing well but I’m still miserable. This is an experience I share with millions of other parents. Who ever realized that simple concupiscence could lead to so many interesting stories and such deep feeling? I think of her on a swing, swinging as high as she could, laughing in the moment of weightlessness on the upswing. I think of her tonsillectomy where I gently, over her protests, placed the gas mask on her and held it until she sagged and closed her eyes, and afterward, seeing me in the hall, she stuck out her tongue. I think of how hard she laughed on the raft ride when a wave sloshed me and it looked like I’d wet my pants. I miss her. She’s entitled to independence, we being mortal and all, but I cherish the moment, our arms around each other, weeping. Did I say I miss her? I do.

 

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Flying through clouds and coming home

The class of 2021 has now matriculated into our midst, those lean exuberant people with lead weights of debt around their ankles, and they’ve set aside the commencement speaker’s advice to take this imperfect world and make it better and instead are trying to make car payments and avoid parental curiosity and enjoy some wild Saturday nights dancing in an amphitheater to a cover band and drinking buckets of beer.

But while they do, their elders are working assiduously to screw up the imperfect world further, such as the Texas legislature, which is passing a bill to allow anyone to sue anybody without having to show that harm was suffered. Their target is abortion clinics, but this revolutionary principle will mean people can sue you for looking at them cross-eyed and we will simply lock our doors and lead our lives on Instagram.

I have given up trying to make a better world and instead I’m working on my sock drawer and maintaining a small circle of friendships, starting with my wife. It’s a large project.

The torch was passed to my generation about fifty years ago and we dropped it in the bushes and now instead of a torch we have the GPS lady showing us the way to Dairy Queen for a Butterfinger Blizzard. Life gets smaller. I briefly got a large view on Friday, flying into New York through a storm front, bouncing in the clouds, which then opened and there was Manhattan in all its magnificence, the forest of towers, and a minute later we were rolling into LGA and then I was in a taxi and back to her, in the doorway, arms open.

The elegant young generation is fascinated by gender labels, LGBSTQN and whatever new ones may come along, such as demisexual, which I hadn’t heard about until last week and had to look up. It means “a person who feels sexual attraction toward one with whom they have developed a strong emotional bond.”

Okay. Good luck with that. But what is more interesting than your gender label is the person in the doorway with open arms, the beloved himself, herself, itself, themself, the voice of the beloved, the jokes of the beloved, the beloved’s brand of toothpaste, the books on the beloved’s side of the bed. (There is another label that dares not speak its name, the Contented Single, but you needn’t fight for the right, you just say No.)

You can fight for the right to be LGBQTSD and people in my generation have fought for the right to marry and enjoy the benefits, the estate tax deduction, the IRA rollover, and so forth.
It came about because millions of Americans who would rather die than see same-sex marriages went ahead and died and others were surprised by children who wanted to form historically unusual relationships and the elders decided to accept this rather than disown their own.

But no matter what label you put on a relationship, love is at the heart of it, or else it is only a theory and of no great comfort.
This love is like a red red rose, it’s like having sunshine on a cloudy day and when it’s cold outside you’ve got the month of May, and it’s what my generation sincerely wants for the young. A man craves leadership and my love provides it. She tries to keep me out of restaurants where the only vegetables are pickles, potato, and fried onions. I stopped drinking twenty years ago in order to spare her anxiety and whenever I mention I might resume on my 80th birthday, she gives me a look. I read stuff I’ve written to her and if she doesn’t laugh, it goes into a manila folder for a while and ferments. She tells me if there’s a rip in my pants or a leaf of spinach in my teeth. She tells me to lighten up. “Smile,” she says, and I do.

There is profound ugliness among us, white nationalists upholding the worst of the 19th century, fearmongers peddling conspiracies, politicians pledging fealty to dishonesty. In the face of this, a person needs to open the door and walk into open arms.

Give it what label you like, bifurcation or perpendicularity or Polident, what matters is what’s between you, which nobody else needs to know about because they wouldn’t understand it anyway. Get offline, walk humbly, be watchful, wait for your other to appear, be grateful, introduce yourself, hang on.

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