Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 46

A ball game, a book, and a brat: happiness

Being a 78-year-old unemployed orphan does not qualify me as a tragic victim and that is just a fact, plus the fact I am married to a woman who has a big heart, loves a good time, is fond of me in particular, and she is also able to read instruction manuals, which is something you don’t notice during courtship, your mind is on other things, but now in the twilight years when one is tempted to throw the new printer over the parapet and hear it crash on the pavement below, it is good to have a rationalist in my life.

So I don’t need to discuss my fear and loathing of washers, dryers, coffee makers, and air conditioners, their mysterious manuals, because that’s her department so instead I’ll tell about Amazon and their purchase of MGM this summer, which earned a bundle for my family so that people now assume we’re going to leave Minnesota and move to an island in the Caribbean. No way.

I’m a Minnesotan and I love it here because here we come to summer by way of a penitential winter and an unpredictable spring so that by July, we’re thankful for whatever we get. We once had snow on the 4th of July. People pretended it was fluff from the cottonwood trees, but fluff doesn’t melt in your hand. Nobody got bent out of shape: it was fun. So long as water comes out of the tap, the toilets flush, and there’s coffee on the stove, life is good.

I went to the Caribbean once and lay in the sun to get a nice tan and become attractive and instead I burned and became pitiful. My ancestors came from Yorkshire, not Yucatán. Shade is my natural habitat. We learn by mistakes. Good judgment comes from exercising bad judgment. This is why we go ice-fishing, so we’ll learn to appreciate a comfortable living room and a game of Scrabble.

Summer is paradise but we Northerners don’t take it to mean divine approval. We accept life as it comes. I went to the ball game Wednesday and saw the White Sox drub our Twins, 6-1, and enjoyed reading a memoir by a woman married to a jerk whose kids didn’t appreciate her one bit, on Kindle, which I ordered from Amazon in the first inning and it arrived at the bottom of the third.

Speaking of Amazon, you may have heard they purchased Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for $8.45 billion, which was a great boon to my family since we’re related to the founders Stanley Metro and Mayer George Latimer and we still hold a big chunk of stock. (The “Goldwyn” comes from a sign at the University of Minnesota stadium, “Win, Gold & Maroon.”) The Minnesota movie industry began with silent movies, silence being a dominant Minnesota trait, and in black & white, snowscapes looked like desert sands, as Polar Pictures proved with “Nanook of the Sahara.” The studio had been in New York where they shot “The Ten Commandments,” but when Moses read from the tablets, the crowd of extras couldn’t listen, they talked among themselves, New Yorkers being the way they are, so the studio moved to Minnesota and MGM managed to buy Polar in the Depression and shot the Tarzan movies in vast limestone caves where the roots of pine trees looked very viny and jungly. Then, one day, Mr. Metro, asked what he loved most, said “Porches” and they thought he said oranges and so the studio moved to L.A. And Gene Kelly waved goodbye as the train pulled out of the station, heading west, and we knew that our glamor years were over and our future would be in corn and soybeans and other row crops. (My given name was Gene Kelly but I changed it because I got tired of being introduced to people who then started singing “Singin’ in the Rain,” and I’ve been okay with that.)

Mayer Latimer is my great-uncle once removed and is still lively and has many descendants so I doubt that I’ll receive more than a few million from the deal but that’s okay. For an elderly orphan, I am doing pretty well. Yesterday, my wife changed the filter on the AC up in the ceiling, standing on a ladder. I stood with my hand on her back to steady her. With the money we saved not calling a repairperson, I purchased a bratwurst with onions at the ballpark and a root beer float. In Minnesota, we find our happiness where we find it.

 

 

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Happiness comes to those who don’t give a rip

I am a happy man now that I know what the secret of happiness is, which, according to Buddha and Jesus both, is to give up wanting things. It’s just that simple. I’ve bought houses in hopes of happiness, taken vacation trips to Hawaii and Norway and Barbados, bought three-piece suits and shirts with French cuffs, and spent as much as $28 on a haircut, and felt vaguely dissatisfied after, but now I am 78, an age at which I expected to be cranky and of course there’s still time but now I discover I can’t get what I want because I’ve forgotten what it is. So there you are. Time solves another problem.

Happiness is rare for a writer, an occupation with a failure rate somewhere around 85 or 92 percent. If doctors had our failure rate, America would be a country of about 15 million, most of them not feeling well. The westward migration would’ve ended at the Mississippi. Why cross a big river when you’re already nauseated and feverish?

Luckily, we writers get to discard our mistakes, unlike doctors. In this line of work, there are no autopsies. I threw away two versions of the first paragraph, each one dumber than the other, and nobody will ever see them, just the one that begins “I am a happy man.” Two sheets of paper, crumpled, in the wastebasket, made me happy.

I was unhappy when I was young because I wanted to be a brilliant intellectual so I wrote dystopian stories and vicious criticism, but in order to pay the rent I went into show business and learned that people are reluctant to pay money to be made miserable, their children can do this for free, so I traded in my black cape for tap shoes. It’s nice to have personal convictions but you also do what you need to do.

Jesus said, “Think not what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink,” and to make this clearer He married me to a strong woman. I would like a bagful of White Castle sliders and french fries and a large vanilla shake, and this cucumber salad and glass of sparkling water are not what I want but not wanting is what makes me happy so I am.

I’m glad that we white Anglo males are in decline on the cultural stock exchange. It was not pleasant being big shots, running around honking, and now we’re free to sit and think about stuff we don’t want. I don’t attend meetings anymore. Women do. Women run the publishing business and so the books are mostly about the sufferings of women, and the Humor shelf is shorter than the selection of anchovies at the grocery. That’s fine by me. I have very few readers and I know most of them personally and I appreciate them more.

Change is inevitable. Why make a big deal about the inevitable? I’m old. What else is new? All my relatives got old except the ones who drowned or died in a car crash in their twenties. Buddy Holly got into that plane in Clear Lake, Iowa, on a snowy night in 1959, and the pilot misread his instruments and flew it into the ground. Buddy was 22. He was cheated of a long life by his own celebrity: the young inexperienced pilot didn’t know how to tell a rock star, “I don’t think this is a good idea.” So Buddy became a legend but who wants to be a legend?

I am a simple man. I avoided watching television for forty years by observing the motto: Not watching TV is easy so long as you can’t find the remote. The way to lose it is to not want to find it. I didn’t want to understand why I spent hours watching a golf tournament on TV, I just wanted to stop so I put the remote somewhere and over the years as cable channels have multiplied like gypsy moths and changing channels has become so complicated that Siri is unable to figure it out, the problem is solved.

I started reading an article about bipolar the other day that scared me, it all sounded so familiar, and I threw it in the trash and I’ve felt okay about myself since. I am grateful for a sunny day but if it rains, I say, “We needed that.” I have my ups and downs but I don’t consider them polar, just Midwestern.

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Sticking my neck out, talking to myself

American culture took a sharp turn when the guitar took supremacy over the keyboard. I was a teenager, I remember it. Little Richard sat down at the piano in 1955 and tore the joint apart with “Tutti Frutti” (A wop bop a loo bop, a lop bam boom!) and Jerry Lee Lewis did the same with “Great Balls of Fire” but Elvis, who could play piano, picked up a guitar as a prop, and a nice Jewish kid in Hibbing, Minnesota, decided to be an alienated loner cowboy poet and a whole generation of loner heroes with Stratocasters blew in on the wind and there went the ball game.

The piano is not a loner instrument. It requires a piano tuner and piano movers. It is a piece of furniture. Playing piano implies home ownership. You can’t put it on the back of your motorcycle. The piano has social standing; it belongs in church or school or a barroom. It is an instrument around which people gather. Whereas the guitar became an ax, a weapon. Your parents wanted you to take piano lessons with Mrs. Lindquist but you went to a junk shop and bought a Sears Silvertone used for $7 and got a Mel Bay chord book and sat in your bedroom and taught yourself to play a G chord and a D7 and then started writing your own songs, about being misunderstood and mistreated and hoping to find a woman to leave this town with and head down the highway.

The guitar took over during the Eisenhower administration but Ike was a general, not a guitarist, but a half-century later a loner with rock ’n’ roll hair put together a slim majority of alienated voters despite persecution by witch hunts and media conspiracies, and he was adored by enormous crowds and he was golden in their adoration. He never was an accompanist, he was himself, a star and genius, a winner, a hero. He played screaming guitar solos though he never touched a string.

People were sick of government, of process and tradition and all that mickeymouse. Done with it. Bobby Zimmerman never intended to take over his dad’s appliance business and join the Hibbing Jaycees. My generation was suspicious of all things corporate and we enjoyed guitar fantasies like Bobby’s, of leaving town and following our heart and becoming an artist, letting our hair grow long, wearing cowboy clothes, making our own rules, living free.

I know people who wound up leading regimented lives in large organizations who nonetheless imagined themselves as loner cowboys and maybe this is why my generation screwed the country up so royally. Brilliant loners invented the PC and the cell phone but in the fields of social betterment requiring consensus, we’re a mess, and this is what opened the door to an angry alienated rock ’n’ roll president. (Uncle Joe is the opposite of alienated; he’s a sing-along guy.)

I make no judgment about any of this. I think old people should leave politics to the young and spend our time dozing on a porch and watching for scarlet tanagers. This is not about politics, it’s about instruments. I feel the nation needs more pianists.

I went to a Bruce Springsteen concert once where he sat solo on stage and accompanied himself at the piano and sang new songs and you could feel the audience’s dissatisfaction, wanting the Boss to reach into that piano and pull out a guitar and play “Born To Run.” It was brave of him to do a show at the piano but they wanted him to be a standard alienated rock ’n’ roll hero.

Little Richard sang love songs to joyful gospel piano, full of gratitude and good feeling, and my generation chose the guitar and got moody and introspective and along came pseudo-intellectual stuff like “My Back Pages” and “Imagine” and “Sounds of Silence” and though the Beatles ventured into gospel with “Help!” the choice of alienation over joyfulness defined my generation and changed America. We were righteous heroes giving the finger to a world that didn’t appreciate us and we wound up electing a finger to the White House.

Well, I’m so much older now and I’ve unplugged my guitar and gotten reconciled with the world. I love all of you like brothers and sisters. Less is more; loss is gain. Thank you for everything, for the wop bop a loo bop, and all the shaking going on. It was all good. If this sounds crazy, well, too much love makes a man insane.

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The truth of the Fourth: a minority report

Nobody gives Fourth of July speeches that I’m aware of because what can you say about beer and barbecue except (1) take small helpings and (2) stay out of the sun and (3) watch what you say and whom you say it to. This is not a united country and the divisions may well extend into your own family, a beloved uncle may cling to cherished ideas that qualify him for full-time supervision lest he spread them to your children. Any speech you’d give about American democracy would consist of four vague generalities wrapped in platitudes and frosted with mythology.

In our country today, a considerable minority of our fellow citizens believe that the 2020 election was stolen in plain sight by left-wing mathematicians in Venezuela who devised algorithms to rig voting machines to overturn a landslide Republican victory and elect a senile Democrat and his communistic base to run the government who want to confiscate your guns and make everyone ride bicycles and live on tofu and kale and who invented a fake Chinese influenza so they could force immunization with a vaccine that makes people passive and accepting of state control, which allows vampires to move freely and drink the blood of small children, but in August, when the rightful president is reinstated and our borders are secure, we can breathe freely again and make America great.

I take no position on that. Strange things happen every day. I am only an observer; I don’t make the rules. As I have said on so many occasions, “You kids work it out among yourselves.”

The history we were taught in school was far from complete. The Revolution of 1776 was held up as a heroic struggle for democracy in the face of tyranny, whereas it was more like a battle of one privileged class against another privileged class. And it could easily have turned out otherwise. The French once held a large piece of the Midwest and Canada where their explorers had penetrated and fur traders followed, but the French didn’t care that much about fur and their northern territory, they cared more about the sugar from their Caribbean colonies, and when, in 1763, they lost the war for the interior, Louis XV was relieved to cut his expenses and Voltaire said, “All we lost was a few acres of snow.” But still, the French were not averse to taking revenge on the English, and a decade later, when the English colonies rose up in rebellion, France encouraged them, and when the Revolution came down to a deadlock, France threw in on the rebel side and blockaded the English from rescuing Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, and that is what turned the tide. Had the French held onto the interior, they wouldn’t have bothered, and the East Coast would be New England and the West would be New Spain and Detroit wouldn’t be Motown, it’d be Ville du Moteur and Fox News would be Nouvelles de Renard. My ancestors in Rhode Island and Connecticut would not have fled to Canada, as they did, and lost all their property, but would have prospered here and our ancestral mansions would be visited by tourists and I would’ve gone to Yale and I’d be a breeder of thoroughbreds and ride to hunt foxes and half the Vermeers and Van Goghs at the Met would have my name on a little brass plaque underneath.

It could easily have gone that way. Plenty of people were opposed to independence. They didn’t do opinion polling in the 18th century because they wanted to think well of their neighbors and not know how ignorant and benighted they were. In 1776, plenty of people waited to see which way the wind was blowing before they committed themselves.

Am I bitter that my family was driven out of the country when our only offense was to stand up for law and order? No, not one whit, not a speck, not a jot or tittle. It was unjust, and the Constitutional Convention was a gigantic scam, and when documents we have in our possession are made public, we will be reinstated and our stolen fortune returned to us with interest and a great deal of Connecticut and Rhode Island will be rightfully ours and Britannia shall rule, love it or leave it, down with the stripes and up with the Union Jack, and God save our gracious Queen.

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What made last Tuesday better than average

Back in Minnesota briefly and in the euphoria of returning home to the land of slow talkers, I called up some friends to invite them to supper at a steakhouse. As the submissive husband of a quasi-vegan, my steak opportunities are few and far between, and she happened to still be in New York, giving me a couple days of freedom to hunker down with other cavemen by a blazing fire and hack at the half-raw hunk of animal flesh and speak Middle English. But several friends declined. Invented excuses. An errand to help a son, a school assignment. As a longtime fictioneer myself, I can detect made-up excuses. The real reason, I’m guessing, was a lingering fear of contagion. My friends are worriers and if you google COVID you will be offered 1,437,893 things to worry about. Arriving from New York, I was unclean in their eyes.

You know me, I’m not a worrier. We have a division of labor in our household and worrying is her department. My job is to be a bringer of joyful enthusiasm. My family was evangelical and expected the world to end and in college I wrote dystopian stories, thinking it was the thing for a serious intellectual to do. For the same reason, I also chain-smoked and drank heavily. Around the time I quit that, it dawned on me that the Creator of the cosmos loves humanity and this includes me. It wasn’t a dramatic event like Heracles slaying the dragon and getting the golden apple, it was more like waking up one day and deciding to stop kicking the wall with your bare feet.

If I were a professional wrestler, the pandemic would’ve been rough on me, being a 300-lb. guy with big tattoos and weird hair and nothing to do but walk his Pekingese, but for a writer, isolation is an opportunity. And I found a young couple to join me for dinner. Two musicians pursuing nonmusical careers that engage them, both of them cheerful and looking ahead, and I ordered oysters and a salad and they ordered a humongous chunk of meat, which might’ve been a flank of antelope or the left cheek of a cougar, which they split, and, just in case their mothers inquired, a serving of broccolini.

It was a jovial two hours and because I am fifty years older than either of them, I did not natter. There was no nattering, no reminiscence about the Swinging Sixties back when pop songs made sense. I asked them questions about their lives and it was illuminatory and inspiring, to hear about real things.

Two hours, during which we did not spend one minute talking about the issues and crises that newspaper columnists have been agonizing over for the past five years. The political fortunes of Vlad the Impaler did not occupy us for five seconds. She is heading into the business of listening to troubled people and he is managing a venue for punk bands and stand-up comics and both are doing well and this makes me happy: young people avoiding the many dark corridors available and pursuing what makes them happy.

This gives me hope for the future, which I have much less of than they, that friendship will see us through whatever happens.
I am not a bundle of charm; I depend on loyalty. I realized this recently when a woman from church asked me to give a Zoom talk to some educators she knows and I did and when I saw my face on the computer screen, my heart sank. So did my face. It’s a face that belongs on a “Wanted” poster at the post office or an ad for a pill that relieves migraines. The educators knew me from my years in radio and when they saw me they were stunned at the difference. For thirty-five minutes, nobody laughed.

Nonetheless, there are ways to be useful. Now and then my wife hands me an odd dish, a platter or a colander or a hypotenuse, and says, “Can you put this on that top shelf?” and I do. It’s an easy reach for me. She asks what I’d like for dinner and I say, “A brisket of beef and a baked potato with butter,” and she serves an arugula cucumber salad with a light vinaigrette dressing and two rye crisps and feels good about having prolonged my life. She looks at me and says, “Smile” and I do and then she does too. I’m smiling now, at the thought of it.

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Sitting with friends at an outdoor cafe on Amsterdam Ave.

It’s a gorgeous June in New York and I feel sorry for the people who can’t be here because they’re in federal custody or have children in soccer programs. I walked in Central Park and admired the dogwood and magnolias and was passed by a tall stunning beauty in running clothes who was dripping with sweat and who, three feet from me, let out a burst of methane like the honk of a goose and did not say “Sorry.” It’s a feature of New York, beautiful women who express themselves freely and without apology. Hurray for outspokenness.

I was brought up to be penitent. I am not a New Yorker. But I feel lucky to be here in a city of great talkers. Words everywhere you look. Wherever people are, they take time to sit with a cup of coffee and consult, confabulate, kibitz, chew the fat, schmooze, shoot the breeze, spill the beans, spread the word, spit it out.

The New Yorkers I know don’t go for alternating dialogue, they like multiple centripetal contrapuntal talk, three people talking at once because when the talk flies the topic shifts and you don’t want to lose your chance to comment on that scoundrel Putin because we’re now on to the Catholic bishops who might deny Communion to a devout Catholic president after four years of playing up to a guy who wouldn’t know Holy Sacraments from a sack of potato chips and then it’s poor Lin Miranda accused of casting people of color who weren’t dark-skinned enough and the dang electric scooters that race through the streets delivering food and terrifying people and the Supreme Court allowing Catholic agencies to deny adoption to gay couples and I’m trying to mention the fact that some Buddhist monks in Tibet are fans of a song I did on the radio meanwhile others mention the candidate for mayor who apparently lives in Jersey whereupon a guy at the end of the table recalls having met the Dalai Lama in New Jersey once, a huge name-drop that blows my Buddhist anecdote to bits, and my wife says something about perfection and this leads the Dalai Lama guy to mention having met Don Larsen who pitched that perfect game for the Yanks.

In Minnesota, table talk is like church — thoughtful reflections with meditative silences — and in New York it’s more like a bar fight, not that I know about bar fights, I don’t, I’m not from here.

Speaking of bar fights, English, as we know it, didn’t come from a commission of lexicographers but from the Battle of Hastings in 1066 when William of Normandy took on the Saxon king Harold who, after extensive hacking and stabbing and clubbing, took an arrow in his left eyeball and his men took to their heels and the Normans seized power in England and thus French and Latin were introduced into Saxon English to make the language you are reading now, not by scholars but by lovers, Norman men bedding Saxon dames and thereby smartening up the old pig-snout mud-smeared English with words like “romance,” “marriage,” “coitus,” and so forth. The women were cheated of citizenship but between the sheets they held their own pretty well and so French was enriched with useful words such as “Sakes alive,” “God help us,” “Listen to me,” “Up yours,” and “Don’t burn down the house.”

I come from rural people with great aptitude for silence and I admire talkers who don’t hesitate to stick their oar in. What it tells you is that the bishops, the candidates, the Supremes, the monks — it’s all a big show and don’t take it too seriously. In Minnesota, talkers are earnest and despair for the world, and in New York it’s all about put-downs and smarting off. I admire this. It tells me, “What’s important is to have good friends and family. The White House? Don’t get your undies in a bunch over it.”

What’s important is local. Eisenhower had less impact on my life than my third-grade teacher, Fern Moehlenbrock. The government people who mattered most to me were the EMTs from the St. Paul fire department who arrived in five minutes when my daughter had febrile seizures twenty years ago. She lay stiff and unconscious on the couch. Five uniforms took charge. One of them pointed out to me, the dad, that I didn’t have pants on. Trump? You gotta be kidding. Get outta here.

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Me and the guy who once met the Dalai Lama

The other day I mentioned to a guy I know that some Buddhist monks in Nepal are fans of my song “Slow Days of Summer,” according to their ESL teacher Jennifer who stopped me on the street to tell me, and I said (which is the truth) that I felt enormously honored, whereupon the guy said that he had once met the Dalai Lama, a huge name-drop that trumped my little anecdote and I suppose I could’ve mentioned having met Dolly Parton or Molly Mason, but those names are light dings compared to the bwanggg of a World Spiritual Leader. I was stunned.

I suppose that the D.L. himself doesn’t go around dropping names, being a religious man who believes that in God’s eyes we are all sparrows. He hangs with the pope and presidents and potentates and spreads his kindly light to one and all, but I’m no lama and in the presence of greatness I grow faint. I gave a luncheon speech in 2009 and to my surprise Michelle Obama was there and it shook me up. I thought, “Why am I telling this silly story about wrestling Julie Christensen when I was 11 to the First Lady of the United States?” I looked at her and she was looking at the door.

My favorite celebrity moment was backstage at Carnegie Hall for the CBS special honoring the 100th birthday of Irving Berlin in 1988. Mr. Berlin wasn’t there but everyone else was. Walter Cronkite, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Tony Bennett, Shirley MacLaine, Willie Nelson (singing “Blue Skies”), Bob Hope, Tommy Tune (tap-dancing “Puttin’ On The Ritz”), Natalie Cole, Leonard Bernstein, Marilyn Horne (“God Bless America”), Rosemary Clooney, and me. (I knew the producer Don Mischer and he snuck me in to recite “All Alone.”) The Carnegie backstage is small and tight and so all the famous were jammed in together and they were all so stunned by the company they were in, they acted like ordinary people and stood quietly and tried to be cool. Bernstein was the only gregarious one, and Ray Charles; Frank Sinatra didn’t say a word.

I’ve been waiting for thirty years to mention that night and never had the nerve to, it was so over the top, and when Carnegie Hall was mentioned in casual conversation, it would’ve been crude and unseemly to pull Leonard Bernstein and Frank Sinatra out of my back pocket, so I haven’t until now, and now I feel ashamed of myself for mentioning it to you. I am not on the same plateau as Bernstein and Sinatra, I was there because I knew Don Mischer. I had an in, which is the real story of my life.

I met a guy at a party once who knew the guy who was Robert Altman’s lawyer and so one day I went to Mr. Altman’s office and pitched a movie and the great director (M*A*S*H, Nashville, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Player), unbeknownst to me was seriously ill at 78 and big studios were leery of investing in him but he intended to keep working until he dropped and I had an important in, some motivated investors, so we made the movie in 2005, the year before he died, and Meryl Streep was in it because she’d never worked with him before and knew it was her last chance, and the movie came out and got decent reviews — the guy in Rolling Stone said it was better than he’d expected it to be — but the crowning moment for me — have I told you about this before? Sorry if I have — was eating lunch with friends at the Café Luxembourg on 70th and Broadway when, as I brought a forkful of salad to my mouth, a woman kissed me on the cheek and the whole café saw and took a deep breath. It was Miss Streep, who’d been eating lunch thirty feet away. Nobody in the café knew me from a bale of hay except the two friends and they were astonished beyond words and still are, fifteen years later.

You people would undoubtedly be cool about being kissed by a major film star, but I’m not. I’m from Anoka, Minnesota, my grandpa was a farmer, so it’s a big deal to me, and I never would’ve mentioned it to you except for the guy who met the Dalai Lama. I’m tempted to tell you about the time I met Bruce Springsteen but there’s no way to get from the Dalai Lama to that, so I’ll save it for another time.

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I have something to say: is that a problem?

It’s a strange world we live in when a Pekingese wins Top Dog honors at the Westminster Dog Show, a furball beating out a whippet and a sheepdog. I read the story twice and it said nothing about the criteria except “showmanship,” which is pretty far-fetched when referring to a lapdog, a dog designed to be a pillow. A whippet is a racer, a sheepdog herds livestock, and a Pekingese simply grows billows of hair that might be, who knows, made into wigs.

But this is the world we live in. Evidently the dog showed a lot of attitude and this impressed the judges, despite the animal’s lack of useful skills. Huskies pull the sled that brings the vaccine to the Arctic village, St. Bernards carry cannisters of warm liquids to fallen mountain climbers and assist them to safety. German shepherds guard the perimeter of the airbase and rip the throats of enemy spies attempting to steal nuclear secrets. Golden retrievers locate lost children. Border collies can be trained to carry crucial messages through a snowstorm to a distant outpost. Doberman pinschers are useful in a pinsch. A Pekingese is simply a furry stuffed dog who happens to poop.

If attitude is now the all-important quality, then Donald J. Trump will win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He knows more about chemistry than all chemists put together. Ask him, he’ll tell you. About one-fourth of the country imagines he won the 2020 dog show over the Irish wolfhound who is in the White House and doing the work.

“What’s your point?” you say. “Get to the point.” I was just about to when you interrupted me. The point is that the country needs to honor competence over attitude. I say this, having come through a small but interesting medical encounter during which competence — knowing how to analyze the problem, arrive at a reasoned plan to deal with the problem, and how to describe the process to the patient — is front and center. The neurologist comes to my little ER alcove and tells me what the high-tech tests have shown and for fifteen minutes I am the focus of high-grade science and am reassured that life will go on. I admire this more than I care about his hair.

The country is in love with attitude and self-expression. I grew up when children were shushed and our parents were self-effacing, reticent to a fault, and it’s rather sweet to see the self-expression available to people today. Never mind Twitter and Instagram, think about the sheer variety of coffee cups in your cupboard today. Back in my day, we had identical beige cups we got as premiums at the gas station and now we have cups with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, sayings by Thoreau, Monet’s water lilies, cartoons, nasty retorts, come-ons. A nice young woman talks to me at a party, wearing a black T-shirt that says, “I look like I’m listening but I’m waiting for someone else” and she is holding a coffee cup that says “Bad girl. Is that a problem?” Her grandmother is a friend of mine and sent her a book I wrote and she is telling me, in a vague way, that she liked it. The T-shirt and the coffee cup are only attitude accent pieces, so she won’t be taken for granted, which is fine by me, but what I really want to know is: what do you do that you care about? Seriously. What is your calling these days?

When I was Bad Girl’s age, I wore a beard, a tweed jacket, jeans, and smoked unfiltered smokes to create an intellectual air about me, but I was a fake. I used CliffsNotes to write a term paper about Moby-Dick, which I’d only read up to page 37, six pages of fake critical intelligence for which I received a B-minus, pure humbug and monkeytalk. My real education was working as a parking lot attendant at 6 a.m. winter mornings on a huge gravel lot on a bluff over the Mississippi, waving cars to park in straight lines, chasing down the freelancers and bullying them back to where they belonged. I believed in creativity but in a parking lot it creates chaos so I embraced authoritarian measures. Enlightening. I was lazy in class but discovered I was a hard worker at heart, menial jobs were up my alley, and that leads to this, writing a short essay about being real. Don’t be a Pekingese. Bring the vaccine. Find lost children.

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O beautiful for summer skies and waves of conversation

Finally, a fine summer, which we Minnesotans appreciate, having endured winter’s attempts to depress us, and just when we were about to go into therapy and talk about how emotionally unavailable our dad was, summer came along and here I am on a sunny day with relatives on a porch enjoying a sweet slow conversation. I’m not so fond of sunshine, I’d prefer a dramatic thunderstorm; I grew up evangelical and I’m happiest when lightning bolts are flashing all around and none are hitting me. But a sunny day is okay.

The relatives are from Florida but they’re nice normal people, no yellow plaid pants, they’re vaccinated, they accept Joe Biden as president, and their kids love books and their dog snoozes on the floor, his head on my daughter’s lap. She’s been afraid of dogs since she was four. She trembles at the sight of one. A hundred times I’ve yelled at her, “It’s only a dog!” but her terror prevailed, and today, by force of will and the beauty of a summer day, she is snuggling with a dog. Her courage brings tears my eyes, pleasure overcoming dread.

It’s so peaceful and pleasant, so much like a summer night in my boyhood, Mother reading the Minneapolis Star, stories about heinous criminals, and Dad dozing through the Millers game on the radio, Red Mottlow the announcer waiting for a Miller home run so he can yell, “Goodbye, mama, that train is leaving the station, Whoooooooooooooo!” Dad didn’t wake up for a home run, only if you turned off the game. My job was to move the sprinkler around the lawn. The dog lay under the porch, panting. I was twelve. I imagined becoming a grown-up and I must say that adulthood has turned out well for me. I never got involved with Lyme disease or poison ivy, never did recreational drugs, and I got out of academia after a year of grad school. I met my wife in 1992, she was the sister of my sister’s high school classmate, so it was sort of an arranged marriage and it’s worked out well, according to me.

My family was circumspect and didn’t talk about love and romance. My parents were crazy about each other but it was the Depression and the courtship went on for years, Grandma needed Dad on the farm after Grandpa died, and one day, driving a double team of horses that spooked and galloped out of control, Dad almost broke his neck when the wagon crashed, and felt his own mortality and the romance became urgent and four months later she was pregnant and they ran off and got married. This wonderful story was kept secret all their lives. Nonetheless, I knew I came from people who loved each other, a profound blessing. I live in the shade of a romance made urgent by wild horses. It’s lovely to be with these young relatives who love each other, their young children deep in their books, my daughter with the dog’s head in her lap. We will ourselves to be happy. So many times my wife has approached her glum husband and put her arms around his neck and kissed the top of his head and thus she wills him to lighten up. And she does it so beautifully that I do. So many times bad feelings have been dispelled, not by talk but by this simple gesture.

This porch is a tiny island and we are aware that a fourth of America’s children are living in poverty, essential workers are abused, the burden of college debt is obscene. The list of injustices goes on and on. Changes need to be made and I believe they’ll come through the efforts of people who know the goodness of life, not from rage and fury. This gentle cadence of conversation, like water lapping on the shore. Life is good. Somebody should stand up on the Fourth of July and say so. We come from fallible human beings but they gave us this beautiful opening to happiness and let us take hold of it and celebrate America. We’re maybe not great at government but we excel at happiness and we produced baseball, the blues, barbecued ribs and the banana split, and when we feel down we can go look at the Badlands or the Grand Canyon. We’ve produced great poets and standup comedians and when the fat lady sings “land of the free,” let’s feel free to put an arm around each other.

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Why I am avoiding retirement and you should too

I feel like teaching a course on aging for people in their fifties who are headed that way but on the wrong path, looking forward to unemployment as if it were not the tragedy it is. My nephew has now achieved unemployment at age 55 and is becoming an outdoorsman and birdwatcher, the most useless occupation available to man, second only to competitive expectoration.

What can I say? The birds know who they are and are attracted to the proper mates and wary of enemies and there is little we can do to be helpful other than put out seed. Instead of showing off his familiarity with the finch family, the nephew could walk through the park, eyes peeled for slimeballs selling bad stuff to teenagers. Birdwatching can be left to the birds themselves.

All of my peers are unemployed except those of us who are writers or engaged in what we call “the arts,” where, as a rule, you keep going until you drop dead. Beethoven and Brahms didn’t retire at 65 because it’s so hard to get that good, you’d naturally keep knocking out the concerti so long as you could see and the Duke of Earl was willing to shell out the guilders. Same with painters. So long as the naked female form still held interest for them, Gauguin and Goya and their painter pals kept at the easels. The artistic life was treacherous, what with syphilis, liver damage, lead poisoning, and the knowledge that your death would wildly inflate the market value of your work, creating wealth for schlumps and nothing for you. Posthumous prosperity: what a rotten deal.

My photographer friends are a happy gang. It’s a collegial world, unlike the factionalism of fiction, the pitiless competition of poetry, the assassins of the essay. Poor focus and off-kilter framing are considered creative choices. But in my course, “The Art of Aging,” I shall guide my students toward a late literary career. You begin by writing comedy, the hardest field of all, and you write a devastating satire of whatever you did for a living, medicine, academia, the ministry, public radio, sanitation, and rip it to shreds, infuriating your colleagues who vote to take away your plaques. Then you turn out a heroic memoir, then write scandalous fiction.

The point is to stay busy. You rise in the morning with stuff to do. Work is a necessity of life. Serious work, not standing in a group of slim silent people with binoculars staring at a whippoorwill, which contributes nothing to society. Crimes occur daily that if birders had devoted themselves to watching the street rather than the sky, suffering would’ve been averted. Electric scooters go racing along the streets, ignoring red lights that if the Audubon-bons served as crossing guards instead, they could save lives rather than impressing each other with their knowledge of wrens.

I am a journalist and our role is to stir up trouble. Television is a deadly sedative: hundreds of channels are streaming thousands of shows and a person glued to it loses cranial sensation. TV is a big blur, like a day spent driving across North Dakota. Rachel Maddow helps, Tucker Carlson, Morning Joe, they try to raise the blood pressure and so does the newspaper. You glance at the front page and find three famous people to despise and your day is thereby given purpose and meaning.

Meanwhile, the disciples of Roger Tory Peterson disperse into the parks and ravines, looking up at the flyways, competing to be the first to distinguish the Canada goose from the Quebec condor and the Vermont vulture, and they feel ignored, having no natural enemies. That is my role. And so I come into their bird blind and scatter seed soaked in hallucinogens that condors and vultures snarf up and minutes later Mildred and Gladys and Marvin and Gordon are under attack by sharp-beaked fowl, waving their parasols in defense, shrieking shrieks the attackers recognize as mating cries and they spread their wings and attempt inappropriate things.

You do not fully appreciate a creature until you are attacked by it. This is what I do for the ornithology gang. I go for the throat, I make them feel like part of the natural order. Birds are real, they’re not a cartoon, and when a drug-crazed bluebird flies up in your face and pecks at your eyes, it’s something you never forget.

Garrison Keillor © 06.08.21

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