Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 47

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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Me and Emily, out on the town

It got into the 90s back home the other day and friends complained to me over the phone though guiltily because they knew I’d spent a day in the ER in New York which, honestly, had been a beautiful illuminatory experience and not miserable at all, but they felt sheepish about complaining of a heat wave and the raccoons devouring their strawberries despite the netting and apologized for talking about it, feeling that a brain seizure trumps a heat wave and rapacious raccoons. Not true.

I came through the valley of the shadow of death and the Lord prepared a table before me in the ER and poured oil on my head and I came out feeling like Emily in “Our Town” — “Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.” I can’t help it that I have a Grover’s Corners side to my personality that emerges during big thunderstorms and at night on the bow of a ship in the mid-Atlantic and once hiking into the Grand Canyon and once during Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and also that time in the ER. Is there such a word as “enraptured”? If there is, that’s what I was.

I expected to be grumpy in old age and of course there’s still time, but instead I’m awestruck. As Emily says, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it — every, every minute?” No, Emily, but I’ve realized life for about 245 minutes since a week ago, and it’s delicious. I was released on Saturday and went to church on Sunday and the choir was glorious and I wrote in the bulletin:

The words come in with a whistle
Like the sound of an incoming missile.
It’s so good to hear it,
“Let us live in the Spirit,”
From Romans, St. Paul’s epistle.

When you’re in the Spirit, it’s a sort of weight loss. I became 165 pounds, walking down Amsterdam Avenue to lunch with a friend whose granddaughter got married recently, the wedding dress refitted to accommodate the little boy in the bride’s belly, and in her great happiness, the grandma is setting out to write a memoir. I told her to avoid modesty. “No problem,” she said. She is 88, a decade ahead of me, and she is funny and sassy and when she goes after the high and the mighty, she can be devastating. She’s a scout riding ahead on the trail and the report is inspiring.

As for raccoons, I take this seriously. My dad grew up on a farm and he loved fresh strawberries, sweet corn, and tomatoes, and that’s why we were landowners, not apartment dwellers. He knew the difference between fresh strawberries and store-bought and fresh was a pleasure he cherished. He didn’t drink whiskey or chew tobacco or dance the tango, but he loved stuff from his garden. I had artistic ambitions and felt superior to gardeners; I was a songwriter and my best song was the one with the verse in the middle:

I love you, darling,
Waiting alone.
Waiting for you to show,
Wishing you’d call me though
I don’t have a phone.

But now I don’t see it as superior to strawberries. The wonders of the world all join in praise of the Creator. Minneapolis made a political decision to require dogs to be leashed because loose dogs can be frightening to children. Dogs running loose also defend the garden against raccoons. And so, Rocky Raccoon devours the good strawberries and people have to buy a pint at the grocery for $6, unfresh from California, and so a growing minority believes that a conspiracy of Satanists is running the country.

I do not. A man who goes into the ER amid the dying and distressed and comes out and goes to church is like Emily, a ghost walking among the living, telling them to love this life and all the ordinary things in it, clocks ticking and coffee and the walnut baklava with gelato and the couples walking along Amsterdam and the long-legged woman in denim shorts and the cops having a smoke and the smile on the waiter’s face as she sets down the bill, which moves me to tip her 40%, that smile that says, “Oh, earth, you are too wonderful,” and I say goodbye to my friend and come home. I have ten more years. What a gift. Life is good and one visit to the ER confirms it so let us drive upstate, darling, and look for a sign, “Pick Your Own Strawberries,” and be ecstatic.

.

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A man in a back pew, thinking to himself

I’ve been avoiding the news for a while, but it was hard to ignore the recent poll by the Public Religion Research Institute that showed about 15 percent of Americans believe the government is controlled by Satanists who kidnap children and drink their blood and that patriots will need to depose them by violent revolution. This represents as many people as belong to Methodist, Presbyterian, and Lutheran churches in America. It is sort of dizzying to contemplate, even for an Episcopalian like me.

The study found that 55 percent of Republicans “mostly disagreed” with those ideas but not entirely. One-fourth of Republicans disagreed entirely, compared to 58 percent of Democrats, which still leaves a good many ambivalent Democrats.

It makes me wonder about the purity of drinking water in the middle of the country. These are not ideas taught in public school civics courses. I’ve never overheard anyone discussing Satanist pedophiles at a table near me at lunch. But PRRI now classifies QAnon, which holds these views, as a major religion. So there you are. Welcome to the 21st century.

This was why I took a vacation from the news, to avoid getting foamed up about something that exists only in people’s minds and not in the world you and I walk through every day. There are paranoids who view passersby with suspicion. I grew up among gentle people who believed that God had revealed truths to them that were denied to the rest of Christendom. I am related to some of those people. Slightly nutty, but harmless.

The day that Senator McConnell proposes a temporary suspension of the Bill of Rights to allow a cleansing of Satanist pedophiles in the State Department is the day I get alarmed about QAnon and until then I don’t care what they think. Let Joe Biden worry about it. That’s what we elected him to do.

I am going to focus on what I hear directly from people I know. I know two women who recently gave birth to their first babies and are joyful and so are their men and that is real news. A grandson is starting college. A daughter is moving. A friend has finished a novel. A widowed friend, marrying again at 84, writes to say he is well and adds, “And it’s none of your business but the sex is great.” A cousin attended a graduation ceremony at a school for intellectually disabled children and one poor graduate stammered through a speech of which little could be understood and the crowd clapped all the harder for him.

Life Goes On. That’s the news. Mosquitoes drink children’s blood and they don’t run the government. And after a year away, I return to my church, the one that believes God sent His Son to this planet to suffer and die for the redemption of the wayward human race.

All of my spiritual elders are gone, the ones who taught me lessons from the Bible, so I am on my own. I pray that they found the heavenly reward they trusted would be theirs. I believe in a fraction of what I was taught, my faith wavers. My faithful older brother whom I could talk to about these things went skating one day, slipped, hit his head, and died, and now I am much older than he is. My elders believed in a fiery Hell but did not beat up on us about it; I don’t. Nor do I believe that Heaven is the most beautiful golf course ever. (“If you hadn’t made me stop smoking, Marge, I could’ve been here years ago.”) But I do believe that when Jesus, surrounded by the sick and impoverished and oppressed, the blind and demon-possessed, said to his disciples, “Whatsoever you do for the least of these, you do for me and your Father in heaven,” he spoke the truth, and if you wish for some truth in your life, along with your interesting attitudes and opinions, this is the one to go for.

My elders tried to make Scripture be clear, rational, inevitable, irrefutable, but it actually is miraculous. Ancient tribes wandering the desert discovered that they were dearly loved by their Creator who allowed them to suffer in hopes it would draw them closer to Him. I don’t get it but I go for it. And the choir was glorious on Sunday. Oh my God in heaven, what a joyful noise.

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Out of the bubble, into the hullabaloo

Spent twenty-four hours in an emergency ward and am still giddy from it and from having gotten off light when it could’ve been otherwise, which someday it will but not yet. I lay in a little alcove, off a busy core of staff at computers, gurneys coming and going, beepers beeping, but vast professional courtesy prevailing. It was a big hospital on 68th and York in Manhattan, so it was an international staff, Asia, Africa, all over. My neighbor was a woman with cancer who often yelled, “Somebody come and help me! I just want to die! Help me!” and my other neighbor was a drunk who was mentally ill and also a jerk, a terrible combination. He had checked himself in and was now calling 911 to come get him out. Four cops arrived. It may have been the highlight of their day.

As for me, I’d been sent by my doctor for tests after I’d twice blanked out and had memory lapses (including the name of my doctor), which alarmed my wife. I called the doctor and his secretary asked for my phone number and when I couldn’t recall it, she put me right through. I took a cab over and Dr. Nash quizzed me. I’ve suffered a couple of strokes in the past, light ones, and he is a good explainer, and I canceled everything and went over to ER. My wife kissed me goodbye and said, “You remember that Maia was born here, right?” I did, then.

One nurse referred to it as “purgatory,” and maybe so, but it was fascinating and maybe the cure for a brain episode is to go to a place that gets your full attention. They shipped me in for an MRI, thirty-five minutes of honking and rasping in a small dark tunnel but I thought of that day back in December 1997, when my wife delivered at this hospital and the Filipino nurse took the little tadpole wrapped in a blanket and handed her to me and her eyes met mine and we’ve been studying each other ever since. This memory was worth the MRI.

I had paper and pen with me, so waiting was no problem and there is plenty of it to be done in ER. A man who experienced blankness does not go to the head of the line. So I wrote. My nurse was Yemeni, the neurologist Israeli, the night nurse was Black from Des Moines. I felt like I was hosting a panel on diversity.

At 4 a.m., a man awoke me to install the electroencephalograph wires on my scalp, an intricate gizmo. He was from Nepal but I heard it as “Naples.” “Beautiful city,” I said. “Country,” he said. It put me in the mood for comedy. I said, “It looks as if you’ve done this before,” and he said, “Each time is like a new experience.” This struck me as the funniest thing I’d heard in days. He thought so too. I asked his name and he said, “You’d only mispronounce it. Call me Bob.” “So you like to work under an alias, then?” I said. He said, “With men your age, yes.” We were an act, meanwhile he was putting contacts on my scalp, freezing them in with a freeze-gun. I said, “So Nepal—you’re Buddhist, right?” “How could you tell?” he said.

He said, “Buddhism is the easiest religion in the world. You just don’t hate anybody. Hindu is very complicated. They love cows and everything else is a matter of degrees.” I thought briefly of the one person in the world I hate, a corporate killer I encountered four years ago, but he seemed irrelevant in this moment. It was almost 5 a.m., I was giddy from lack of sleep, like back in college, and it made me think maybe I could use more nights like this, and the dying woman was moaning, a useful reminder that time is limited.

I still felt good at 9 a.m. when Dr. Nash came by to tell me the tests showed it had been a seizure, not a stroke, a spark in the circuit that throws off the timing. I was lucky. I told him that a resident neurologist with wild hair had been by to see me who looked like a junior in high school and I told him we expect our neurologists to be bald. Dr. Nash said, “Actually, he’s a sophomore.” I asked him if an EEG can detect dementia and he said, “Yes, some kinds, but you’re not there yet.” Dr. Nash is bald, so I’m going to take his word for it.

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