Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 49

My plan for the future, whenever it happens

Spring is here, the park is gloriously in bloom, and I sit on a sunny bench watching the young on the running path, working hard out of their fear of mortality, and I feel the great privilege of being in my late seventies, all my ambition gone, enjoying life itself, not aiming for distinguishment. All those decades I tried to be intelligent, to be in the know and to maintain a cool sense of irony, an elegant detachment from the mundane, and now that rock-climb is over: it takes no effort whatsoever to be an old man. You sit in the park and savor your happiness and let the young do the suffering.

I enjoy writing more now than I ever used to. I have writer friends my age who’ve been stuck for decades because they once published a book that was greeted by heavyweight critics as “provocative and profound,” “unflinching,” “bold and riveting,” “dense and dazzling,” “lushly layered,” “exceptional,” and “exquisitely crafted,” so now they look at a first draft and there’s nothing exquisite and it makes them flinch — you get put on a high pedestal and it’s a long way down. But nobody ever accused me of exquisiteness, the most I ever got was “amusing yet often poignant.” That’s not a pedestal, it’s a low curb. So I write freely, happily, no looking back.

Now that we’re vaccinated, I’m trying to talk my sweetie into taking a long car trip and head west since heading east from Manhattan takes you into deep water, and enjoy a month or two of dedicated aimlessness. So many of my well-laid plans have gone astray so I’d like to try improvisation. Just get in the car and go.

My great-great-grandfather David Powell felt that urge back in 1859 when he and a bunch of other Iowa farmers formed a wagon train and headed west in the great Colorado silver rush. He was tired of raising corn and hogs and fathering ten children and the gold rush was a great excuse for irresponsibility.

He got to Colorado too late for gold but thirty years later got in on the Oklahoma land rush. I’d like to see that river he crossed and find his gravesite in Hennessey, Oklahoma.

All the gold is gone and I’m not looking for land, I just want to roam. I haven’t taken a long car trip since I was a kid. Every summer my parents packed us in a station wagon and drove from Minnesota to Idaho to visit relatives and it was a great thrill, sitting in a window seat and holding my hand out the window, planing through the air, feeling the lift, and then in adult life I switched to airlines and now getting on a plane is like riding the school bus to high school except now there are seat belts.

The beauty of freedom is that you don’t know what might happen. I flew to Rome once on a sudden impulse, my first trip, and the day before I left, I got a haircut and told my barber George Latimer that I was hoping to meet the pope and he said, “No way. You’re not even Catholic. You won’t get within a mile of him.” I got to Rome and ran into a priest from Milwaukee, Father Reginald Foster, the head Vatican Latinist, and he took me on a tour of the Vatican and showed me the Latin ATM he’d designed, the only one in the world, and who should be withdrawing cash but the pope himself. He invited me up to his penthouse. There was a ping-pong table. He made popcorn. Offered me a Pepsi. And then he said to me, “Qui in nomine Domini Dei tui interficiam capillos? Et tamquam degradatur monachus. Et maior patera exsequi oportuit meum iussum.” (“Who in the name of God cut your hair? You look like a defrocked monk. He should’ve used a bigger bowl.”)

I met my wife in this park in April 1992. She came running by and I got up and ran after her, in my suit and tie and brown wingtips, and caught up with her, and the rest is history. I haven’t run since. What would be the point? But a random car trip east from L.A. on two-lane roads through mountains, listening to the radio, sounds perfect. Sirius Radio has hundreds of channels, some serious, most frivolous. Click the Random switch and you get Buck Owens one moment, Backstreet Boys, Bix Beiderbecke, then J.S. Bach.

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A walk around the Central Park Reservoir

With the birth rate falling and America getting old and cranky, it’s wonderful to walk in Central Park on a sunny day and see all the little families rollicking around, all the little kiddos. It’s brave to raise boisterous kids in a small apartment in a bumpy economy and good for Joe Biden that he put some child support in his Recovery Act. We need more of these kids, otherwise we’ll become a national historical reenactment.

I don’t want that. I want the past to fade into the sunset, except for the classics, like Central Park. I walk in the park as April comes in and it’s a genteel world like what Renoir painted in Paris with the ladies carrying parasols and Dvořák walked in Prague whistling a tune that became the Humoresque that generations of kids would learn for spring recitals and Shakespeare sat in and scribbled notes for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” –– it is a permanent pleasure, to be cherished for all time, but I want life to move on so the kids grow up and think of Vietnam as a cuisine and trump as part of card games and “pandemic” will come to mean a college prof who gets negative reviews.

The past lives on with Google and that’s okay. In every phone and laptop is a trove of trivia and the answers to all questions –– where did Allen Ginsberg write “Howl” (an apartment on Montgomery Street in San Francisco), or what president hit a hole-in-one during his presidency (Jerry Ford), or the name of George Custer’s horse at the Little Big Horn (Comanche, and he outlived Custer by fifteen years) –– are easily available. Back in the day, you’d’ve spent months in the library paging through dusty tomes in the reference room to get this information and now it’s literally at your fingertips. Good enough.

Everything is on the Internet, the entire subterranean depths of demons and obsessions. You can read a website saying that doctors and nurses who administer COVID vaccine should be tried as war criminals. You can visit the world of men in love with weaponry. A man writes: “The AK-47 has endearing qualities, is easy to manipulate, the sights are rugged, and a reasonably skilled person can get maybe 60 rounds a minute out. And they’re fun as hell.” This strikes me as lunatic fringe but it’s a fringe that is steering the Republican Party.

I used Google the other day to locate a column by Russell Baker that I vaguely remembered from his years writing for the New York Times. He was a great writer but it was mostly in newsprint which, as we know, winds up being used to catch spillage or as a dog’s toilet.

Baker was walking along a street in New York and a potato fell from a high window, missing him by a few inches, and shattered on the sidewalk. He wrote, “Coming through a raw‐potato near miss intact has one advantage. It is such a rare event that the odds against being involved in two during one lifetime are overwhelming. Hence, it is as close to statistical certainty as a thing can be that falling potato will not be the instrument of my farewell.”

It was a great column, admired by a generation of columnists including me, but if I went to the library and searched for it, I might spend weeks in the newspaper vaults and come to resent Baker and never want to hear his name again, but if you google “Russell Baker falling potato” there it is in an instant. This is as close to immortality as a columnist gets, to know that your brilliant potato column is ever available to the curious.

Creating a new world of harmony and justice is not in my windshield. I am past that age. My goal is brightening the corner where I am by writing about whatever happens to fall at my feet and let other people deal with the lack of diversity in the royal family and the issue of trans participation in women’s sports. The ship got stuck in the Suez because it was overloaded: Duh. Wake up. People look to us Minnesotans for leadership but there is only so much we can do. We gave you Bob Dylan who gave you “The Times, They Are A-Changin’” — which is true except in some places like Central Park, the 19th century’s gift to us and these children and their children too.

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Still thinking of Yesenia weeks later

When I read in the paper last month about impoverished children playing in a park and finding used hypodermics and thereby contracting HIV, the tragedy stuck with me. I had a young child once, two of them, twenty years apart, and can envision this happening and how the heart would break absolutely. And this story puts all the other lesser stories into line: this is a prime function of journalism, to show us the difference between hokum and hogwash and bean counting and true tragedy.

The scrimmage in the Senate over the filibuster is a contest of mastodons. And the discovery of the subatomic particle, the muon, that physicists say may change our understanding of the cosmos is a cloud of mist. You read and turn the page. And then comes a story that brings you to full attention.

The early morning crash in the California desert on March 2nd of the Peterbilt truck and the Ford SUV packed with 25 Mexican and Guatemalan migrants was a tragedy to be grieved over by any reader. The first officers on the scene found bodies scattered on the highway, some moving, a woman crying out in Spanish, brushing the blood from her daughter’s beautiful face, Yesenia Melendrez Cardona, 23, dead. They had traveled 2,500 miles to Mexicali on the U.S. border and paid thousands of dollars apiece to be smuggled across and a few miles north the SUV ran a stop sign and was crushed by the truck and 13 persons died.

Yesenia was the same age as my daughter and this tiny link is enough and I remember long ago riding on a bus that collided with a car and killed four of its passengers, the bodies on the highway, and I can put myself inside that SUV, racing north to avoid the law, the driver distracted by the crush of the crowd around him, the lights of the truck in the dimness of dawn, the moment of physical panic, the blinding flash, the dark.

This is the grace of tragedy: you are able to imagine yourself into it, comedy is only a show. The SUV is smashed and we all go flying, and that is me and my daughter lying on the pavement, a sheriff looking down at us, red lights flashing, and she wipes the blood from my face and sees that I am dead, a horrible moment (for her, not me) that I contemplate for long enough to feel dread in her behalf and know in my gut that I matter in this world, I am not inconsequential, and then she walks into the kitchen and sits down opposite me and says, “Make me laugh” as she does every morning and I tell her the limerick about the barber of Stamford, Connecticut, who thought, for each client whose head he cut, he’d take his sharp shears and cut off their ears, a grave violation of etiquette.

I remember the Sunday morning I was on my way to church in New York and got caught up in a crowd going into a Catholic church on Amsterdam Avenue and rather than get loose I went with them into a Spanish Mass, crowded into a pew, kneeling next to a weeping woman with a bright blue and silver scarf over her head and I remember that as I think of the SUV and Yesenia.

I’m not Catholic, not even close. I come from fundamentalists and we were all doctrine, no mystery, and on the basis of solid doctrine explained to us by J.N. Darby, we held the world at arm’s length and refused to love it, and here I was in a mystery, worshipping with the handymen and cleaning ladies, and it was powerfully moving. I wept with my neighbor. For all that I couldn’t understand, I felt deeply. God help us. Give these good people some comfort and happiness in my country and keep them close to their smart kids at City College and NYU. God lift the burden of regret and remorse on the back of this old Anglo. The woman weeping next to me leaned my way, and I prayed for her prayers to be answered.

Afterward I walked out into America and here we are. Yesenia Melendrez Cardona was drawn to us by hope and died on the highway and this tragedy places us securely in the Almighty’s hands. We each have work to do. And now we go do it.

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Spring arrives in time to forgive us our debts

It’s spring, the air is brisk, the forsythia is blooming, there’s widespread amiability afoot, and walking through Central Park you feel you could pull twenty pedestrians out of the flow and rehearse them in “New York, New York, it’s a heck of a town, the Bronx is up and the Battery’s down, the people ride in a hole in the ground.” Winter tried to hang on, like a loud drunk at closing time who staggers around and takes a swing at you but eventually you heave him into a cab and it’s spring. “All the merry little birds are flying in the floating in the very spirits singing in are winging in the blossoming,” as E.E. Cummings down on 10th Street & Greenwich Avenue wrote. “And viva, sweet love.”

New York gets a bad rap, much of it richly deserved, but spring is such a blessing you can almost forgive the rest. You wend your way from the Trinity churchyard where Mr. Hamilton lies who got not one thin dime from the musical he inspired, through the Village where brilliant and bewildered people once lived, and visit Grand Central with its starry ceiling and the Rose Reading Room of the Public Library, hike past the schist outcroppings of Central Park and Teddy Roosevelt on his horse defending the Natural History museum, the apartment palaces of the Upper West Side, the cheese department at Zabar’s where you gain weight with every deep breath you take, Harlem, the Cloisters, the mighty Hudson — and did I mention the schist outcroppings? My family forbade dirty talk and so the word “schist” is a favorite of mine.

When spring is here, the city opens its doors and spills out onto the sidewalks, diners sit under awnings on the sunny side of the street, greenmarkets set their goods out on wooden pallets, elders perch on the brownstone steps and gaze on you and me with a judicious eye but they see little kids come trotting along and their hard hearts melt. On Sunday, I walked to 83rd Street to mail some letters and passed a little Victorian firehouse, one truck wide, wedged in the row of brownstones holding off the invasion of high-rise condos. A papa stood on the corner, embracing one tall daughter, then the other. Skateboarders swooped along the bike lane, helmeted kids on scooters. Brisk walkers passing us amblers, people walking their shaggy dogs who watch for other shaggy dogs to talk to. The sun was out and there was good feeling everywhere you looked.

There are prosperous writers in this neighborhood who are busy writing angsty memoirs or nonfiction about heinous acts by cruel men, so it’s up to me, a tourist of long standing, to pay witness to public happiness, the old couple feasting on fettucine in the sunshine, the proud papa, the gallant skateboarders.

No alleys here so everything happens out on the street, goods are trucked in, garbage is trucked away, you’re walking along a busy loading dock with flower boxes.

At 81st, I went down into the subway and the downtown train rolled in just as I reached the platform, one of those transformative moments — every little thing you’ve done all day up to that moment feels perfectly timed — and squeezed into the car without actually touching anyone. I hung on to the overhead bar, feet nicely spread, as we rumbled south, six complete strangers within a few inches of me, everyone in his or her own space, avoiding eye contact, thinking their own thoughts.

I once saw John Updike on a downtown C train, the good gray man of letters grinning at the life around him, and once on the same train I saw the master trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. Nobody bothered either one of them and they rode along with us commoners. Both times, I tried not to stare. “On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy,” said E.B. White. “No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.” And that was the gift I found in Central Park, approaching the reservoir on Sunday. Thanks to my mask, my glasses fogged up but I could see the cherry tree blooming in the park and bystanders holding up their cellphones in case the tree decided to say something.

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Portrait of the columnist as an older man

I respect the Rembrandt self-portrait at the Frick in New York, at which millions of us commoners have stopped and felt chastened by that noble 17th-century gaze that says, “What have you done great lately?” Not much. I look in the mirror and see a grim-faced old fundamentalist staring back and now I understand why, when I went to parties back when there were parties, people social-distanced around me before there was such a thing. I wandered alone around people’s living rooms looking at photographs of their friends on the walls, wishing I had friends too. So I’m thinking about seeing a dermatologist about getting Botox to give me a beautiful smile but my wife says, “Do not go down that road. No matter what, Botox never looks right. I don’t want a husband who looks laminated.” And so I’ve come to accept that being loved by one person is an amazement, especially when I know she looks at me and sees Boris Karloff.

We live in New York because she loves music and shows and has friends here who can talk for three hours nonstop. I’m more at home in Minnesota among friends who are comfortable with silence. I feel uneasy in New York because it has bike lanes and I’m certain that one day I’ll be struck down and killed by a deliveryman on a bicycle. They go whizzing by at top speed and do not slow down for red lights or pedestrians. A shout and a quick whiff of sausage pizza with extra onions and that’ll be the end of me. The obituary will say, “He was struck by a pizza deliveryman and died instantly.” It won’t mention the distinguished limericks I wrote, or my classy memoir, my radio reminiscences. There won’t be a link to a video of me singing “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” with Heather Masse. In people’s minds, I will be forever linked to pizza and they will wonder, “What size and did the family who ordered it get a refund?”

But life is good, especially if you had an unhappy childhood among fundamentalists thinking about the imminent end of the world. After a hellfire childhood, everything is easy. People who complain about pandemic life grew up with unrealistic expectations based on watching Mister Fred Rogers who led kids to imagine the world as a friendly neighborhood in which you are well-liked just the way you are and don’t need Botox. So they find it hard to cope with endless days of isolation.

I was touched on Wednesday when my love said to me, quietly, “I am so excited about my new salad spinner.” In the past, we’ve been excited by various things that I needn’t describe here, and now a salad spinner. Scrabble excites us. She won last night with the word “strainer,” scoring 82 points. If the shutdown continues, we may be thrilled by a bowl of mixed nuts.

To the gospel preachers of my youth, New York was a hotbed of licentiousness, but the COVID virus has brought about a life of rectitude that centuries of preaching never could and here I am at home with a woman excited by a salad spinner. I’m happy. My calendar is clear. I’m free to write a sonnet for her so I did.

When I consider how my life is spent
Searching the apartment, high and low,
Trying to find out where my glasses went,
Where I set them down a minute ago.
From room to room I search in drawers and shelves
While others compose and paint and write
Books and bring great honor to themselves,
I struggle to regain my sight.
The irony of one with such poor vision
Searching for glasses is a symbol, rather clear,
Of the fragility of the human condition,
And then, my love, I look and see you here.
“I lost my glasses,” I say, “can you find them, please?”
And you do and clean them and the blind man sees.

Notice it doesn’t pledge undying love, it only thanks her for finding my lost glasses. They were on the table near my computer and I couldn’t see them. I put them on and saw my reflection in the window and decided to stay home, so go ahead and order pizza and don’t worry you may be responsible for my demise. It isn’t a great sonnet, not as exciting as a salad spinner, but anyway we already have one of those.

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Still thinking of George, wishing I’d known him

I am still thinking about George Floyd almost a year after he died with the cop’s knee on his neck because it was in south Minneapolis, a few blocks from the Brethren Meeting Hall I attended as a kid, near where my aunts Margaret and Ruby lived. I wish I had met him but I didn’t patronize the Conga Latin Bistro where he worked security and I didn’t eat at the Trinidadian café he liked. He’d come here from his hometown of Houston where he grew up in the projects in Beyoncé’s old neighborhood. He was a high school basketball star, went to college but it didn’t take, did some hip-hop and rap, did drugs, did prison time, and got religion. He attended a charismatic church that met on a basketball court and he was the guy who hauled a horse-watering trough out on the floor for the pastor to baptize people in. He came north to get in a drug rehab program and change his life.

He’d been unusually tall since middle school and knew that this made him appear threatening and to avoid trouble, he adopted a friendly demeanor all his life. He grew to 6’7” and 225 lbs. He made himself meek and blessed are the meek. He was easygoing, even sort of shy. Shaking hands, he used two hands. He was a hugger. He could lift up a troublemaker and carry him out of the Club. He tried to dance but was too tall, and people laughed at him, and he didn’t mind. He kept a Bible by his bed and in his struggles with addiction, he and his girlfriend Courtney made a practice of standing together, hand in hand, and reciting the Lord’s Prayer and the Twenty-third Psalm. A tall Black man far from his family, dealing with demons, stood close to his girlfriend and they both said, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me” and declared their faith in goodness and mercy.

He was accused of passing a counterfeit $20 bill and he died with the officer’s knee on his neck and thanks to the onlookers who recorded his death with their cellphones, it became the most famous death in a viral year of anonymous deaths, and he was made into a social cause. This gentle giant had never expressed himself as a victim; he grew up well-loved and all his life he never felt excluded but loved the ones he was with, just as Christ told him to do. Everyone was his neighbor.

South Minneapolis in my youth was highly segregated, no different from any Southern city, and if Margaret or Ruby had met George, they might have been alarmed. When I was 17, my friends and I played basketball against a team of big Black guys in Minneapolis and we were scared speechless and could hardly dribble the ball. George was aware of the effect of his size and color but his gentleness won the day, and if he had spoken the psalm to my aunts and held out his hand, I believe they would’ve taken it in theirs. They would be moved that he knew the words by heart, the green pastures and still waters, the paths of righteousness. George knew the meaning of “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies” — it means that even in the midst of hate, there is beauty and generosity and goodness.

There is also silliness. Our secular liberal society does not know how to honor a godly man and in honor of George Floyd, white institutions issued reams of mission statements about inclusivity and diversity and banning words such as “master” that might be triggers. The “Massa” in Massachusetts could be a trigger and maybe it should change its name to Minnechusetts. To me, this isn’t justice, it’s masturbation, but in the world we live in, gesture trumps reality.

George Floyd was a religious man and the corner where he died is now a shrine. The mob that burned and looted after his death mistook him for something else. Minneapolis is honored by his life, the fact that he sought redemption here. He has already forgiven the cop. I know this. We can honor him by reaching out to others in trouble, as we are, and taking their hand and saying, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” and the pasture and waters and if I forget the rod and the staff, or if I skip the anointing of the head with oil and go to the cup running over, you correct me, and in so doing, you and I will light a candle on the table that’s been prepared for us. God rest your soul, George, and in perpetual light may you at last be able to dance.

 

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Pardon me if I talk about back where I’m from

I spent the pandemic in New York where I don’t know anybody except my wife so quarantine was no problem and after I got vaccinated I went home to Minnesota and had dinner with five people I’ve known forever or more, and it was a pleasure that’s worth getting old for. With old friends, conversation is simple: you open your mouth and there’s a big balloon full of words. With new people, it’s like a job interview. So I love Minnesota where those old friends are. And it’s a state that needs to be loved.

Minnesota is flyover land and no matter what greatness we produce — Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Hubert, Jessica Lange, Prince, Al Franken, Bob Zimmerman — all that people know about us is that it gets cold there.

I was in Paris one January years ago on a bitterly cold day, sitting in a bistro, La Ponpon, packed with gaunt young people all dressed in black and elderly communists with enormous eyebrows and embittered poets writing in tiny black notebooks, everybody chain-smoking Gauloises and drinking vials of acidic black coffee and tumblers of absinthe, and a skinny woman across the table from me, reading Albert Camus in French, stared at me and finally asked, “Where are you from?” and I said, “Je viens du Minnesota” and she said, “So this cold weather must be nothing to you.”

Minnesota is overlooked because we were brought up not to brag, not toot our horn, not dance in the end zone. When a Minnesotan hits a grand-slam homer in the ninth to come from behind and win the championship, he trots around the bases, ignoring the roar of the crowd, and crosses home plate and walks, head down, to the dugout, and sits down, no waving his cap to the crowd, and afterward he autographs a hundred caps for hospitalized children and goes home, and mows his lawn.

My favorite Minnesota hero is Stan Nelson, who made me do chin-ups in phy-ed class at Anoka High School in 1957. I couldn’t do them but he made me try. I didn’t know until Stan’s 100th birthday celebration that Stan had piloted an LCI 492 landing craft at Normandy Beach on D-Day, making four separate landings, dropping four bands of troops. He had been in danger but he knew that the men he ferried in were in greater danger and many would die and so he wore his honors privately.

I once visited Harry Blackmun of St. Paul at the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington where he was employed as an associate justice and we went for a walk around the block. He had written the decision in Roe v. Wade that made abortion legal and there were protesters in the Court plaza who would gladly have swarmed him and stoned him but nobody noticed him because, like a true Minnesotan, he was good at being nondescript.

I grew up wanting to be a satirist, as most teenagers did, but soon realized that my people were extremely sensitive to ridicule, and if I made fun of northern hospitality, Minnesota cuisine, systemic modesty, or January, it felt like treason — it amused outsiders but my people were hurt as if I had yanked out their toenails with pliers, and so I limited myself to gentle satire, which is to say “not all that funny,” to the detriment of my career. I never won the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, but then neither did Seinfeld or Johnny Carson, so who cares? And instead of major awards, I have these old friends. Some luck lies not in getting what you want but getting what you have, which — once you take a good look — you may realize is what you would’ve wanted if you had only known. I’m not sure that sentence is grammatically correct but it’s true.

I wanted to escape when I was 17 and move to New York but I was broke so I stayed home and now that I’m married to a New Yorker who loves me, I miss Minnesota. I miss the culture of small talk. My dad never went into a gas station or shop without striking up a conversation about the weather or whatever, which shows our respect for each other. Asian, Black, Latino, he made conversation with everyone. The woman behind the convenience store counter wears a name tag, “Efthimiatou,” and I say, as my dad would’ve, “How do you pronounce that? It’s a lovely name. Beautiful day today. It’s definitely getting warmer. Spring is on the way. As long as I’m here, why don’t I buy some of those daffodils.”

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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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