Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 49

What it’s like to be old, if you want to know

I was back home in Minnesota last week, throwing away boxes of old manuscripts to spare my darling from having to deal with them after she plants me in the Home for the Happily Medicated. I saved the stuff thinking it might ferment, like wine, but it hasn’t, so out it goes. I look out the window at Loring Park where I used to walk when I was 17, on a break from my dishwashing job at the Evangeline Hotel, my first job out of high school. I was practicing smoking Pall Malls to prepare for a literary career. I’m 78 now and last week I had dinner with the man who hired me to do a radio show when I was in my 20s.  Diligence and discipline are all well and good, but thank God for wild good luck.

It was a music show on Saturday nights. I grew up fundamentalist and we avoided rhythm for fear it would lead to dancing and copulation so we praised God in slow mournful voices, like a fishing village whose men had been lost in a storm. We never learned to play a musical instrument for fear we might have talent and this would lead to employment in places where people drink liquor. When the radio show started, my lack of musical ability determined that I’d be the emcee. My musician friends didn’t want to do it: they were proud of their ability to play tunes with intricate fingering at impossible tempos. So I became the guy who walks downstage and says hello to the audience and tells the joke about the man and his wife who die in a car crash and they go to heaven and it’s stunningly beautiful and he says, “If you hadn’t made me stop smoking we could’ve gotten here when we were young enough to enjoy it.” And so, for lack of talent, I was made boss and had job security for 40 years. My bio, in less than 25 words.

This was back in the Era of Agitation, when people were opposing the draft and picketing Honeywell to protest weapons manufacture, and women were fighting to be ordained and gays were fighting for gaiety. I’m over that now. Now I’m in love with ordinary American life.

I love looking at runners, each with his or her individual gait. The Fitness Era started after the Agitation. I hated phy-ed, thought running was boring, but I admire it as a democratic movement, people of all ages, many colors and ethnicities and creeds, some listening to Bach, some to punk, but feeling a common bond and all smelling bad. Each with an individual style and all feel warmly toward each other.

I love public happiness such as our State Fair, a place for gluttony and violent centrifugal experiences in contraptions operated by tattooed men who might have done prison time for larceny, a time to see giant Percherons and designer chickens with topknots and anklets and pumpkins the size of studio apartments.

I love the prospect of sitting in the right field bleachers, a sunny day, the outfielders shifting for each batter. I wait for a great play, a diving catch, a home run stolen, a double off the wall and the fielder pegs it to the cutoff man who catches the batter trying to make it a triple. Three or four great plays in a game, each one memorable.

The other day, I ordered lunch online and I learned I could track the delivery on my laptop, following the red car icon as it heads north on Lyndale to our apartment building. Somehow the technology that put a man on the moon has been put to work to reassure me that food is on the way.

When I was young, I imagined that old people think a lot about death, but no, I’m thinking about a video I took with my cellphone. I’m old enough to remember phones on the wall with cranks you turned to get an operator. There was no video. This video on my phone is from the Fair, of my daughter laughing hysterically. We’re in a boat on the River Raft ride and she’s looking at me and my pants are wet. This is the meaning of my life right here, my girl screaming with delight. When I’m in the Home, bring me the phone, let me look at it again.

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I’m not hoping for normal, no thank you

I think of the chicken when I crack the two eggs into the fry pan for breakfast but when I put in the sausage patty, I don’t think of the pig. The egg is a work of art; the sausage is a product. As a young man I tried to make art but I didn’t want to work in a factory (teach) to support my art, so I chose to do radio, which is a form of sausage. I admire the egg but I enjoy the sausage more. And it makes me feel good about my life, a good thing at 5 a.m.

It’s dark out. I’m alone in Minnesota, so the coffee is my own, not my wife’s good coffee but a bitter, accusatory brew. It’s Lent, but I don’t notice it because we’ve had Lent since a year ago when we and a bunch of friends were about to go on a Caribbean cruise and then the word “pandemic” was uttered and I hung my white linen suit up in the closet and Jenny and I, who had only been husband and wife before, set out to become best friends, boon companions, cellmates. When you are locked down, it’s a choice between best friendship and putting rat poison on your pancakes. Rat poison is not a good death.

Back in my careering days, I abandoned her for periods of time and she has completely forgiven me. And here we are. We sit at the table and she says, “You just dropped a pill on the floor” and I look and there it is. I feel noticed, just like a peacock I once saw walk across a yard, his great fan of bejeweled feathers open wide, following a peahen whom he had a crush on, and he stretched out his gaudy neck and shook the little doodads on his head and waved the great fan of iridescent blue-green beauty and she looked up and noticed. This happens to me when I read her something I just wrote, like this very paragraph about the peacock, and she laughs out loud at the thought of me as a large bird in a pen.

When the virus is beaten back and we are free to mingle again, I plan to go on living the small life we’ve led for the past year. I’ll go visit my London family and my wife’s cousins in Stockholm but home is where my heart is and mainly what I learn from travel is that wherever I go, I don’t belong there. I go to Paris and realize I’m not French, not even close. Same with Florida, the land of yellow pants.

I like my small life. Back in my adventuresome years, I canoed into the northern wilderness looking for spiritual lessons out there and once saw an airliner high overhead and thought, “I would rather be up there than down here.” Whenever I fly over wilderness, I remember that and am grateful for my water and a snack.

I have ambitious friends engaged in fighting gender bias and urban squalor and trying to bring diversity to the arts and rename streets now named for bigots and chauvinists, and I love these folks, but conversation with them can be tiring, so many dangerous topics to be avoided. They are Living Large and I’ve chosen small so I need to hang with forgiving souls like my wife. The sentence about the peacock was a highlight of my day. I don’t read the newspaper. My wife does and whenever she says, “Oh my God,” I say, “What?” and she tells me what. The “Oh My God” news is enough for me. Usually it’s funny.

I come from fundamentalist people who were into social distancing before anyone else was — we avoided Catholics and were uneasy around Lutherans — but in a pandemic, locked up with your BF, distance is only available in your sleep. I put my head on the pillow and imagine I’m on a bicycle pedaling south on Lyndale Avenue toward Minneapolis, past cornfields, into the city heading for the library downtown. It’s 1953. I pass a bandbox café, a sawmill, a slaughterhouse, and by the time I come to the printing district, I’m asleep, and I wake up and it’s 2021. She isn’t here but there are two eggs and sausage and this sarcastic coffee. As we say in Minnesota, it could be worse.

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Blame it on the internet, why not?

Every time I mention Joe in my column, I get ferocious mail from a few readers describing him as a criminal and a moron who is out to destroy America, which I forgive them for, but Scripture says that’s not enough: “Bless them that curse you, pray for them which despitefully use you,” which is easy with email, you just say, “God bless you, sir” and press Delete, but Scripture is not geared for digital, it’s about the up close and personal, and what if someone in a red cap walked up to me and started yelling this stuff? People, I just plain don’t have time for that. I’m busy writing sonnets, I want to talk with my wife, baseball season starts soon, I don’t have time to hear about the landslide reelection that was stolen by Venezuelans.

The Christian faith sets some very high standards: “Ye cannot be my disciples unless you give up all you possess,” Jesus said, which is disturbing to me as a homeowner with an IRA and a closet full of clothes. The guys sleeping on cardboard in the bus depot — are they former Episcopalians who gave up their apartments for discipleship? Did they used to go out to French restaurants and then to a musical with a big dance number, actors with hands over their heads, singing about a beautiful tomorrow, and one Sunday morning the verse from the Gospel of St. Luke hit them on the head and they gave up materialism? And what did their wives say? Renouncing materialism is not an individual decision: others are involved. Was St. Luke married?

My wife and I enjoy materialism all the more in this pandemic. The coffeepot is basic to our life, and the laptop computer. We sit drinking coffee and talking and questions arise — did Nichols & May once do a sketch in which he kisses her passionately and while locked in the kiss she opens the corner of her mouth and exhales cigarette smoke Yes, and it’s on YouTube. The laptop holds the answers to all questions. Was Luke one of the twelve apostles? Nope. He came later, a disciple of Paul, a physician and a Gentile. How popular is the name “Gary”? Not so much. In 2020, only a few dozen American infant boys became Garyed, making it 774th on the list. (Liam is at the top. When I was born, in 1942, there were no Liams around. You could’ve aimed a fire hose down a crowded street and never dampened a Liam.)

Where would we be without Google? We’d be at the library, wasting our lives searching through reference books in the basement, looking up odd facts. I googled, “Where would we be without Google?” the other day and in 39/100ths of a second Google located 4,530,000,000 results. If I spent one minute examining each result, it would take me thousands of years. So there’s your answer. Thanks to Google, we get enough information to kill us many times over. In the old days, we experienced the world directly through sight, sound, touch, and personal memory, and now we look for it in a computer.

I worry about memory loss now after my cousin told me about a family reunion I had forgotten I put on years ago where there were bagpipers and her little daughter Maggie sat on my lap and said my eyebrows looked like caterpillars. I don’t think I’m demented, but how would I know? Thank goodness, my sister found pictures of the party on her computer.

I was a writer back then, and now the young writers I know are working as Uber drivers because the publishing business is going the way of carriage-making and nobody I know is making a living from it. The Internet killed it, Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. And so I write sonnets for lefties to amuse people who consider me to be one.

When I think of you, Christina, my eyes get misty,
If any sensible man wished to be kissed he
Would want it to be your sweet lips.
You were a beautiful radical left-winger,
Marcher, protester, and folksinger,
With forty pins on your bosom for all your memberships.
I see you holding a sign on campus long ago,
The big letters: CAPITALISM HAS TO GO
Oh my darling Chris, if you kissed
Me I would gladly be a communist.
Your kisses would set off bright sparks
That turn this man toward Karl Marx.
We’d find a cabin to get warm and spoony in
And there would be a Soviet union.

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Peter Ostroushko: Living in Wonderful Memories and in his Music Forever

Peter picked up his dad’s mandolin when he was a child and that was the start. Soon he could play fiddle or guitar, too. He was a teenager in high school when he knocked on Rudy Darling’s door and said he lived a few houses away and heard Rudy playing as he was walking by and could they get together sometime and play. So they did. He played some with Rudy’s band, the Middle Spunk Creek Boys, and then with Dakota Dave Hull, the Powdermilk Biscuit Band, the New Prairie Ramblers, the Mando Boys, Robin and Linda Williams. Once, in Ashland, he walked onstage with the Spunks and stumbled and fell, carrying a borrowed Gibson mandolin, tucked it into his body, curled up, did a somersault, got to his feet, mandolin unharmed. He grew up on Ukrainian cooking and came to love barbecue, and looked for BBQ joints near the venues he played — “No pig, no gig,” said Peter. He met Marge and they lived in a house on Nicollet Island, upstairs from guitarist Tim Hennessy, who called him “Mr. Buddy,” and they played swing, Irish fiddle tunes, bluegrass, and Peter’s compositions. Everyone who jammed with Pete or was in a band with him felt his intensity. He was a quick learner, eager to take on any challenge. His playing reflected his own personality: warm, sweet, humorous, honest, generous, mellow. Once, playing a bar, Pete’s band was heckled by a group of bikers and he swung into playing the Hokey Pokey and won them over. He liked the freedom of playing in duos with Dirk Freymuth, Arkadiy Yushin, Danny Gotham, Dean Magraw, Dan Chouinard, Dáithí Sproule, but he also loved double- and triple-fiddle tunes. He’d hear someone noodling something backstage and say, “Let’s do that tonight — play it again for me,” and he would learn it instantly. He played in clubs, on the radio, and as a favor for friends. He was a pro at touring — booked the flights, the hotels, the rental cars, did all the driving. He never said a harsh word to musicians he played with. He had the chops and he had the heart. He could sight-read at tempo. He was always focused on the tune and his instrument, never seemed to be out to impress anyone. He was a mentor and teacher and if asked was glad to show you how to play “Gold Rush” or “Jerusalem Ridge” or “Black Mountain Rag” or “Nine Years Waltz,” or “Hamilton County Breakdown,” which he liked to play at breakneck speed. He had a powerful perfect in-time tremolo on mandolin that other players tried to imitate. On A Prairie Home Companion, Pete got to meet his hero Jethro Burns and jam with him backstage on “Nola” and “Tico Tico,” two challenging numbers that Pete made his own. With his good friend Dick Nunneley, he formed the Mando Boys quartet, two mandolins, mandola, and mandocello, and arranged music for it, swing tunes and ragtime, Brazilian choros, Bach, Vivaldi, original work, doing shows in which Peter (under the name Maxim) was the bandleader and spoke several languages, though not English, and Dick was his translator, and Pete got his chance to be a great comedian.

After his devastating stroke that left him in a wheelchair, unable to play music, he liked to listen to tapes of him and his friends playing, and when they came to a difficult passage and the friend did well, Pete turned to him and said, “See? See? You could do it,” still the teacher and encourager. He was a gifted and generous man and we are suddenly poorer without him.

–Your Prairie Home family

Tim Hennessy, Barb Montero, Peter, Bob DouglasJethro Burns, Peter, Richard DworskyAnna and PeterPeter and Dakota Dave HullGarrison, Greg Brown, Peter, Vern Sutton, Prudence Johnson, Kate MacKenziePeter OstroushkoA compilation from A Prairie Home Companion

Given Peter Ostroushko’s quiet and unassuming manner, his musical genius and remarkable range may have come as a surprise to those unfamiliar with his extraordinary talent. No surprise to his friends and collaborators and legions of fans. He could do it all — from old-time and bluegrass tunes to blues to Brazilian choros to jazz standards to his own compositions and more. And you’d be hard-pressed to think of anyone who played with more heart. This compilation is a tip of the iceberg. Here is a listing of all the tracks.

Brazilian Tune in D – 11/2/91 – Rob Fisher and the Coffee Club OrchestraBilly in the Low Ground – 12/22/79 – Bob Douglas, Tim HennessyComing Down from Red Lodge – 3/16/02 – Rich Dworsky and the Guy’s All-Star Shoe Band with Dan NewtonWalking in Jerusalem Just Like John – 10/1/05 – Garrison Keillor, Rich Dworsky and the Guy’s All-Star Shoe BandLord, In Thy Bosom We Will Rest – 2/12/05 – Rich Dworsky and the Loner String QuartetMadison – 6/12/93 – Rob Fisher and the Coffee Club OrchestraA-Roving on a Winter’s Night – 12/22/79 – Bob Douglas, Tim HennessyEast Texas Waltz – 3/9/02 – Rich Dworsky, Pat Donohue, Gary Raynor, Cindy CashdollarHeart of the Heartland – 1/24/98 – Friends and Rich Dworsky, Greg Hippen, Gordy KnudtsonMedley from Texas – 1/20/01 – Rich Dworsky and the Guy’s All-Star Shoe Band with Randy SabienMedicine Bow – 6/3/00 – Rich DworskyFreight Train Blues – 11/1/75 – Robin and Linda WilliamsMy People are Built Low to the Ground – 5/16/98 – Rich Dworsky, Greg Hippen, Gordy KnudtsonMeditation on the Thin Space at St. Paul’s Chapel – 6/22/02 – Rich DworskyMusette in A – 11/2/91 – Rob Fisher and the Coffee Club OrchestraNo Name Blues – 3/2/02 – Rich Dworsky and the Guy’s All-Star Shoe Band with Cindy CashdollarPuckett’s Farewell – 1/20/01 – Rich Dworsky and Gary RaynorOne More Spring in Minnesota – 4/20/85 – Garrison Keillor, Chet Atkins and BandPuppy Belly Dance – 10/19/02 – Rich Dworsky and the Guy’s All-Star Shoe BandNew Smyrna Serenade – 3/16/02 – Rich DworskySacred Heart – 6/3/00 – Rich DworskyVirginia Reel from Hell – 1/24/98 – Dean Magraw and FriendsI’m So Glad You Came Into My Life – 5/16/98 – Friends and Rich Dworsky, Greg Hippen, Gordy KnudtsonVisit Peter Ostroushko’s website to listen to his podcasts. Consider making a contribution to the GoFundMe account to help the family with many remaining expenses.

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Excuse me while I have a few words with Joe

Now that Joe and Jill are moved in and their stuff unpacked and shoes lined up in the closet, the country is getting used to the idea of a slender president who owns dogs and has a working wife who is openly affectionate, and what remains to discover is what recreational activity will the man take up? People need to see their president having fun: a sense of humor is at the heart of democracy, so let’s regain it.

So far he’s been hunkered down at his desk, doing his job, which is good to see. Leader of the Free World is a full-time job and other than Sundays at church, he’s stuck close to home. But the man needs to enjoy himself, too.

Remember when Kamala Harris introduced him to come out and speak and the man jogged out to the lectern? Big stage, long jog — he was trying to counter Republican talk of him being doddery and frail, and now I pray to God he doesn’t take up running. Please. Remember when Jimmy Carter ran in a marathon and collapsed and the Secret Service had to scoop him up? He looked like death on toast. It was the end of the Carter presidency right then and there. A president should avoid all sports that might lead to physical collapse. It’s terrible for the stock market.

Golf, it goes without saying, is off the list. Too many optical memories. And the sight of the presidential posterior as he bends for a putt is off-putting. And what it costs the Secret Service to secure a golf course for two hours is absurd and obscene.

Ronald Reagan looked terrific on horseback, thanks to his years at Warner Brothers. Same with John Kennedy at the helm of a sailboat, rudder in hand. But those aren’t Joe’s scenes. Seeing his fondness for his big dogs won over a lot of people who feared he might harbor communistic tendencies. Dog-lovers are not pinkos; commies have always preferred cats. Those dogs are working dogs, not show dogs, rescue dogs, and they can be retrained as retrievers and go pheasant hunting. Of course it would irritate the vegan caucus of the Democratic Party but the pluses outweigh the minuses — Joe tramping through tall grass in South Dakota, his faithful dogs by his side, and suddenly there’s a frantic flutter of wings in the tall grass and he raises the shotgun to his shoulder and shoots and the dogs retrieve the deadsters and in the act of shooting, he becomes iconic, Man the Bringer of Provisions. He could do this by raising carrots and onions, of course, but hoeing lacks the impact of shooting. Just ask the pheasant.

The last Democratic president to win South Dakota was LBJ in 1964. Biden hunting pheasants could change that and maybe win Wyoming and Montana. It needs to be changed. The country is in crisis when one of the major parties turns its back on rural America and forces them to vote psychotic. We Democrats do well among fencers and archery enthusiasts but we’ve crossed gun owners off our list. Guns have been around since the 14th century. In rural America, guns are normal; it’s not like L.A. that way. Get over it.

Be a hunter, sir. Head for South Dakota with the dogs and spend the night in a cabin by a roaring fire and feast on pheasant, have a whiskey or two, enjoy immature jokes. Face it, we’ve let the Left go gentle, trapping us in the caregiver role, making us susceptible to defeat by tough-talking autocrats. Half of America sees us Democrats as the Party of Croquet, Crochet, and Croissants. You can change this, Joe, by simply picking up a shotgun. You’ve come a long way in one year. The Republicans tried to label you as Biden, a stranger with weird friends and lots of odd baggage, but you’ve become Joe. Trump was a verb but you’re a noun, a real person, an uncle, a brother, and when you take the dogs to the cabin in the Black Hills, your country cousins will be enormously pleased. Do not go golfing. If you have clubs, throw them away. Air Force One lands in Rapid City and you and the dogs come down the ramp and you’re grinning as you get in the pickup and head for the hills and I’m seeing a 75% approval rating, maybe 80, 85 if you bag your limit.

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The old scout stands in line at the clinic

I married a pro-vaxxer, which is good to know after all these years — we never discussed vaccines during courtship — and in addition to her respect for science, she has the patience to track down clinics online and spend time on Hold and so now I am vaccinated. I sat for fifteen minutes so the nurse could see that I didn’t faint or show distress and I wrote a poem.

The clinic that offers vaccine
Resembles a well-run machine,
I got my shot,
Sat down, was not
Dizzy or hot or pale green,
No aftereffects,
Loss of reflex,
Skin wasn’t waxy
So I hopped in a taxi,
Went home to my wife,
Resuming my life,
Which still is, thank God, quite routine.
Isolated, as monks, but serene,
Trying to keep my hands clean.

I was not asked for a credit card at any point, or a Medicare card, so evidently the country is slipping into socialism, as Republicans predicted, but I am too old to argue, I obey. Young people wearing badges told me which line to get in and I did. A young woman who said she was a nurse gave the shot and I didn’t ask to see her license. Nor did I ask for assurance that the vaccine did not contain a hallucinogen that would make me accept the Fake News: I already accept that Joe Biden was elected president and that Trump supporters invaded the Capitol on January 6. It’s too laborious to believe otherwise. This is Occam’s Razor, the principle they taught in high school science: the simpler theory tends to be true. You’d have to devote weeks to working up a new theory of massive electoral fraud by Venezuelans and Antifans buying thousands of MAGA hats to storm the Capitol, and at 78 I don’t have the time for that. The vaccine may extend my lifetime but there are no guarantees.

This is the problem with getting old: you’re forced to face up to mortality and so you cut back on your commitments. I probably could be a decent tennis player again but I’d have to devote twenty hours a week to the effort. Ditto soap carving, stamp collecting, and the study of coelacanths. It’d take too much time so these must be left to younger people, along with dread and dismay. Too time-consuming.

More and more people around me are dying and it’s never the ones I wish would expire. I have four people on my wish list whom, as a Christian, I should forgive but I don’t because (1) they haven’t asked and (2) forgiveness will not change their loathsomeness, so instead I wish for them to go live in Alabama or Mississippi and perhaps secede, and meanwhile I dread the phone ringing, for fear that one of the righteous has fallen instead.

I keep in close touch with several octogenarians whom I think of as an advance party, just as Custer had a band of Crow scouts at the Little Big Horn who knew the territory, and when I ring up my scouts and ask, “How are you?” I want to know what 83 and 85 and 87 feel like from day to day. My cousin Stan is my oldest scout at 89 and still walks and exercises and has all his marbles — when I spoke to him last week, he twice corrected his own grammar — so I hope for eleven more years, fully marbled, which makes me cheerful and cheerfulness is the key to the kingdom. I avoid dark topics such as global warming and the demise of democracy — and leave those to the young who will have to deal with them.

I watched some of the Senate trial and I worry for my country, that we’re deciding finally who we are but I’m a back issue. I was 21 when President Kennedy was shot and a great deal died in Dealey Plaza, and then the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, and the Ambassador Hotel in L.A. My grandson, who just graduated with honors from college, came long after all that and is fascinated by politics and is ambitious to dig in and more power to him. I’m living in the liberal tribal reservation of Manhattan’s Upper West Side and so I know nothing. My mission is to live gracefully and be amused at mortality and keep in touch with the people in their 50s and 60s looking to me for guidance. No complaining. Be useful. Every day you make your partner laugh is a good day.

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The pandemic: one man’s appreciation

I am sitting here watching over and over a video my wife took with her phone in Central Park after the 18-inch snowfall last week, looking through the trees at a snowy hill and listening to the shouts and shrieks of joy from New York children as they slide down the hill on saucers and sleds and cardboard. Shrieks of joy are a rare and beautiful thing and I keep replaying this 60-second drama, recalling my own sliding days back in Minnesota. the steep hill that we slid down and out onto the frozen Mississippi.

I remember feeling joyful on a toboggan with Corinne. We were 10 years old. She stood, her hands fluttering at her side, and I climbed on behind her and we slid at tremendous speed and I’m sure we shrieked. On the Central Park video, some parents are sliding with their kids, but this was unknown back in my day. Parents stayed indoors; the snow belonged to children. I do note that the New York parents do not shriek. Joy fades with age, though I did once see a gang of old men in Virginia dancing to jigs and hornpipes, and joy shone clear in their faces. I was brought up by evangelicals who forbade dancing on the grounds that it was licentious but here were old men grinning as their feet kept up with fast fiddlers. No shrieks but some whoops and yells.

The joy at the heart of the lockdown in the pandemic is the daily reassurance that you married the right person. A funny person with her own life who is never at a loss for words and so is good company and who reads the news for me and passes along the good stuff.

She read me a story in the Times last week about the hellish life in the skinny skinny new skyscrapers of Manhattan. Developers have taken tiny lots and thrown up a 90-story needle and sold apartments for vast amounts to people who want to look down on the rest of us but meanwhile high winds cause the needle to sway dramatically, which often snaps water pipes and causes major leaks and brings elevators to a stop and causes eerie whining sounds. It gave us joy, to think that architects and developers have found a way to earn big profits from torturing oligarchs from authoritarian countries who have way too much money.

Conversation is precious when you are only two and there is no live theater except what you provide each other. She walks every day in Central Park and comes back to tell me about the women runners discussing relationships as they go past and the homeless woman, a Trumper, who sells gewgaws from a tarp by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the jazz guy at the Belvedere Plaza who said to the other jazz guy, “Dude, you went to Juilliard, what do you mean you forgot where you left your trombone?”

So I propose that instead of giving silver chafing dishes or classy china for wedding presents, we give the prospective couple a whole month in which they live together alone, as in a pandemic, and see what happens. There will be energetic sex, surely, but if there is a shortage of conversation, an unwillingness to unload the truth, a self-conscious solemnity, and (God forbid) some weird ideas about fraudulent elections and Democrats feasting on the blood of small children, then there’s time to reconsider and save yourself years of anguish.

I looked at the Central Park sliding hill the other day and it’s bare, all the snow has been sledded off it. The joyful children have gone back to cloistered apartment life and virtual classes and addiction to electronics. The blizzard was a window into the pleasures of the nineteenth century, when, yes, there were deadly epidemics, as now, but at the same time, there was joy, as can be heard in jigs and hornpipes, and more snow, back before Greenland started melting. Back then, the old oligarchs were locked up in stone castles, not jiggled in skinny towers, but they were not immune to tragedy and found that joy cannot be purchased as one pleases. They took the train to Florida for the sun and sat under an umbrella and worried about the next panic.

No, joyfulness is in short supply, but it’s out there in the snow and on the ice rink. The beach is a false promise. Get a sled and wait for a blizzard.

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An old Democrat in a chorus in the Orkneys

I missed out on the GameStop frenzy on Wall Street last week and didn’t earn a bundle of money, but for me, it was enough that the temperature got up to forty, a slight thaw that made me think of spring, I being the registered optimist that I am. After all, I am a Democrat, the party that seeks to legislate against ignorance and cruelty. I believe in the goodness of people I pass on the street and I think that by July, we’ll be crowding into comedy clubs and laughing at pandemic jokes.

Other people imagine that the thaw means snow melting on the roof and leaking down the walls and dripping asphalt onto our scrambled eggs, causing incurable cancer. I do not imagine toxic snowmelt. I imagine baseball.

Ice is our friend. The ice melt on Earth is now twice what it was in the Nineties, 1.3 trillion tons a year, due to global warming, and this melt leads to the rise of oceans and more warming. Our grandchildren will have to deal with the problem and they will look back at the early 21st century as the Era of Stupidification. I regret that. But one must be hopeful. When you’re tied to the railroad track and the headlight of the Midnight Special is getting brighter and brighter, hope is what you have.

I was born in Minnesota, which most people know nothing about except that it gets cold in the winter and so wherever you go, you begin with a clean slate. A Chicagoan carries real baggage — people assume you have Mob connections or know people who do — and a Southern Californian is assumed to have an intelligence deficit caused by solar overexposure — and a New Yorker is assumed to not know where Minnesota is, not even approximately. But a Minnesotan is a blank slate. You can be Bob Dylan, you can be Walter Mondale, or anything in between. Mondale is the perfect model of a modest Minnesotan but he has his salty side too. He once told a friend of mine who asked if Walter thought he should go to work in a big law firm: “You’ll spend four years kissing ass and they won’t even turn around and say, Thank you.” Bravo, Mr. Vice President.

Complaining about cold and ice is not useful, so Minnesotans are brought up not to complain, and this is an asset. The lockdown that will soon observe its first anniversary is a time of genuine deprivation, but it could be worse, and it is worse for health care workers, bus drivers, schoolteachers, the list goes on and on, so if you’re an old retired guy locked up with a woman you dearly like to be with, shut your mouth.

I’ve found during the pandemic that my dream life has become quite rich: long novels with sustained dialogue. The other night I was working in the Orkney Islands on a trawler that hauled various goods from one port to another. The sea was calm. My shipmates spoke in a musical dialect that, odd as it was, I understood perfectly. Sometimes, hauling crates along a wharf, one of them would burst into song and we all sang together, a chorus of big burly men singing four-part harmony, rousing sea chanteys and heartbreaking laments for lost love. We walked through town past a barrelworks where men were shaping oak staves to make barrels to store whiskey in. We stopped in a tavern and had a glass of whiskey and sang some more. It was a fabulous dream. I’d love to go back and rejoin those men, if only I knew where the door is.

Back in normal times when I was busy trying to be successful, I didn’t have dreams like that. I’m grateful for them now. I dreamed one night that I was a college professor and a basketball player named Kendrick was a close friend of mine, a student, 6’6” with size 15 shoes, Black, a star player who hoped to play pro ball in France. His girlfriend was French. He had withering things to say about Midwestern Scandinavians but he loved Paris and was eager to go. He was a happy guy, very gentle, and in the dream I sat and listened to him talk and talk. It was beautiful.

The newspaper bears dreadful news and of course one must pay attention. There is suffering in the world beyond my comprehension. But I am grateful for good dreams. And for the vaccine. And spring is on the way.

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The world turns, days get longer

The days are definitely longer. I got a COVID shot last week and a guy in Georgia invited me to come do a show in the fall and one morning I asked my wife, “What’s in the news?” and she said, “Not much.” Things change, we move on, “lizard brain” is now in the Oxford English Dictionary and so is “amenitize” and “back-sass,” “bohunkus,” “code speak” (deliberately ambiguous), “cooked-up,” “jinx” (when two people say the same thing simultaneously), “pitchy” (meaning off-key), and “running around like a chicken with its head cut off,” and this is not the Omaha English Dictionary, this is O-X-F-O-R-D, this is men in medieval gowns and hoods with letters after their names such as DCL, DM, and DLitt and where “color” is spelled with a U.

The decapitated chicken was a common phrase in my childhood, and one we saw firsthand in the backyard when we killed chickens. Nobody in my family ever got frantic, there was no shouting, no hysteria. Once in a blue moon my mom might say, “You kids are driving me to a nervous breakdown,” but no breakdown followed. We were a quiet family; I don’t claim that this is virtuous but it certainly saves time.

I came to imagine that an impassioned temperament was a sign of artistic talent so I accepted being an ordinary workman, which suits me just fine. And I accept being a white male though I don’t consider it definitive, any more than “size-12 shoe” or “Minnesotan” or “man on blood thinner” is. I am not simply white, I’m of Scots-Yorkshire ancestry, a mournful people who thrive on cold and cloudiness. Precipitation cheers us up. In bright sunlight we shrivel up, put us in a cold fog and we bloom. We are comfortable with silence. We wave away compliments. We are good at suppressing feeling, our own and other people’s. Nonetheless, when the woman I love sits on my lap and puts her head against mine and says, “I need you,” I am moved, deeply. I don’t hurl brushfuls of paint at a canvas or compose a crashing sonata or write a long poem, unpunctuated, all lowercase, in poetic code speak and revolutionary syntax, but I am very moved. I wouldn’t say so if it weren’t true.

This is a benefit of the lockdown. Two persons isolated together in a small space, their contact with the larger world severely limited, either come to appreciate each other tenderly or they seek distant corners. I appreciate this one and like to lie in bed next to her and speak softly about whatever is on my mind, tell her secrets, and though she is reading a book, she hears me and responds. We used to have a bigger life and now it’s quite small and I feel content in it. She does the worrying and I, coming from the Cold Rain People, am happy to be warm and indoors.

Americans died at Normandy and Guadalcanal and Okinawa and the Battle of the Bulge to defeat the fascist racist white nationalists, and they didn’t intend to die but they accomplished good by their sacrifice, and we should be grateful. More of our people have died of COVID-19 than died in World War II, which is a tragedy, but if we the survivors gain from the pandemic a love of the simpler life and a tenderness for those in isolation with us, then this should be put in words.

The white nationalists who stormed the Capitol are fighting for the rights of the fearful to avenge themselves on society — if you suffer from violent hallucinations and carrying an AR-15 in the Piggly Wiggly gives you comfort, go right ahead — and we the quiet majority are drawing comfort from movies and books and cooking and Googling the OED. I could Google Little Richard and there he’d be, on YouTube, standing at the piano, banging out “Tutti Frutti.” I enjoy a little tutti-fruttism now and then but I abstain now because my wife is working the crossword. She reads a clue to me: “the —– is wider than the sky: Emily Dickinson” and I say “Brain” and this impresses her. I also spell Samuel Pepys’s last name for her.

It is a small transaction. I majored in English in college and here I’ve put my education to some use. But in the pandemic lockdown, it feels important. It makes me happy. I wish there were more words for domestic happiness. We have plenty of words for deliberate ambiguity; we need words for the silent comfort of being in one room with the one you love.

 

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A night outside, eating with friends

I admit that when I hear the word “impeachment” I think of fruit, and “censure” makes me think of dentures, which is a sign that I’ve been watching too much news: time for a break. How often can you look at the man with the tattooed pectorals and the horned helmet and what understanding do you gain from it? So you make the screen go dark and do other things.

The lady and I went to dinner with friends the other night and the four of us spent more than an hour making no reference to the riot at the Capitol, an entirely trumpless hour, which felt like a triumph. We ate outdoors under heat lamps on Broadway, opposite Lincoln Center, which is very very dark, and we didn’t talk about the virus either.

We talked about a baby named Charlie born in Atlanta a few days before and showed pictures of him, tightly swaddled. His mother is a mathematician married to a landscape architect. The fact that young people still want to bring children into this world is an encouraging sign, a gesture of faith.

So is Lincoln Center. In the Fifties, they tore down sixteen acres of tenements in Hell’s Kitchen and under the sponsorship of the Rockefeller brothers they built a symphony hall, an opera house, a theater, and a dance theater around a plaza with a fountain. Republicans were behind it and Lincoln’s name is on it and when you attend events here, you brush elbows with a good many moguls and grande dames who probably miss Ronald Reagan keenly and you go in to watch performers, 95 percent of them Democrats, some to the left of Bernie Sanders, but the conflicting views between the stage and the box seats are forgotten in the glory of “Der Rosenkavalier” or Beethoven or “Les Sylphides.” If your heart is open to the gifts of genius, you will walk across the plaza afterward, past the fountain, and feel transformed.

I once saw Ellie Dehn of my hometown, Anoka, Minnesota, in a lead role in “Don Giovanni” at the Metropolitan Opera, and in that glorious moment, I felt that we are truly one country, one people. Anoka is an old milling town on the Mississippi, a football town, but this fabulous soprano had found her way to Manhattan, and I was there to see it. So I’m provincial — what of it? My wife, also an Anokan, had been taken to see the Met’s touring company perform “Carmen” in Minneapolis, Grace Bumbry in the title role. My wife was twelve and stood through the entire performance and has been enthralled by opera ever since and made a career playing viola in the pit. So many things are possible. Dream on. Practice, practice, practice.

I first saw the U.S. Capitol in 1962, heading for Baltimore to attend a wedding, got lost, saw a lighted dome and realized I was in Washington. I parked and walked up the steps and in the door, past one policeman sitting on a folding chair in the foyer, and walked in under the great dome and looked at the statues and murals, and saw only a couple of cops relaxing in a hallway, not paying much attention to anybody.

When I tell people about that night, it feels like ancient history. Those days will never return. Even at the opera, security men wand you as you come through the turnstile. After the Capitol insurrection of January 6, security will be iron-tight forever to come, metal detectors will beep at every steel zipper, uniformed men with assault weapons will watch your every move. Walking into the Capitol of 1962, the openness of it told you that we are a civilized society with a high level of mutual trust. I don’t care to ever visit Washington again and see our government on wartime alert for attacks by our fellow Americans. Too painful.

I’ve seen what I needed to see of Washington. I sat in the Senate gallery once and watched the proceedings and it was dominated by the sort of self-important people I avoided in high school. I went to a ceremony at the White House once and sat where I could see Barack Obama’s teleprompter and saw how beautifully he improvised something much better than the script. So I’ve seen the good and the not so good. America will never be what it once was but still it is good enough. And if Hawley and Cruz get tossed out on the street, we will be better for it.

 

 

 

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