Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 5

Stating the case as simply as possible

May is here and we only get one a year and a person needs to go outdoors and take a deep breath, walk away from the news, which rubs our faces in the angry arrogant pointless presidency of a bonehead, and walk in the park and observe the delight of kindergarteners leashed together like sled dogs, heading for a grassy lawn to be unleashed and go dashing around, yelling, laughing, New York apartment kids thrilled by freedom of movement, running in circles, playing tag, hiding behind trees. And the tulips are in full color and food trucks are grilling brats and street musicians are strumming and drumming and the world is joyful.

I grew up among solemn fundamentalist men and their dutiful wives, and though Scripture mentions joy they avoided it themselves, but we kids found it by chasing each other, skipping stones on the river, shooting baskets, skating, daredevil bicycling, and in May joy is hard to suppress, especially in the north, you walk down the street with a root beer float and smell new-mown grass and observe girls in summer dresses and hear “I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day” sung to a rhythm track and you realize that delight is a necessity, our sanity depends on it. Whatsoever things are lovely, think on those things, said the apostle Paul and so I put away the paper and go for a walk in the park and look for little kids and there it is. God did not put us here to be insulted and tormented, and live under malign corrupt leadership.

It happened to be the day the bonehead printed in his Truth Social a photoshopped pic of himself in a pope outfit and proposing himself as a candidate. This was a couple days after he returned from Pope Francis’s funeral in Rome where he scored a front-row seat and so the coffin of the saintly Francis, the “people’s pope” with the scuffed shoes who brought the Church to accept the blessing of gay couples, was upstaged by a convicted felon who is busy cutting billions and billions from medical research and humanitarian aid to desperate people.

His appearing in pope attire so soon after the funeral achieved a level of tastelessness beyond anything he had done before and late-night comics who’ve been feasting on him for years were confused by it — how to satirize a man who satirizes himself so expertly. Hitler took himself seriously — he thought his postage-stamp mustache and the upward flung salute were meaningful, but here’s this pathetic palooka maneuvering the U.S. Army into staging a big parade with tanks and jets on his birthday, a level of childishness every other president in our time would’ve avoided at all costs. Meanwhile his pal Cardinal Dolan says about the pope photo, “I hope it wasn’t his idea.” Someone ptuies in your face and then does it again and you think, “I hope that was an accident.”

The man is a gross insult to every living American citizen, he has made us a nation of nincompoops in the eyes of the world, and yet most of his voters are still behind him. They are writing a new chapter in the history of mass delusion. Every morning the news hits us like a baseball bat. How did this crook and clown achieve the White House so he could wage war on science, higher education, the Constitution, regulatory agencies, and the world economy, while redecorating the Oval Office to look like the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas.

There are two intelligent, principled Republican men who know they have turned a blind eye and hung on too long and watched a cruel dumbbell turn Lincoln’s party into a fascist cult. They are Mike Johnson and John Thune. They know the man up close and personal: he is a dreadful joke. They need to bring themselves to do their duty and oppose him. The man is a coward. He’s shown it over and over again. Stand up to him and he will fold like tissue paper. The Constitution provides the remedy. Impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors. Bribery is one. The man’s crypto scam is a pipeline for bribes.

Remove him from office and let us begin the long process of restoring the honor of our country. The world needs America and when we elect a brazen blockhead to power, we put the entire planet in danger.

This country’s ideals cannot survive this man’s term of office. It’s just that simple. Republicans have served up a cowpie for supper and they must take it away.

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What I do for the sake of love

I board the plane at LaGuardia where everything goes well until I reach TSA and a uniformed woman asks if I have any metal implants in my body and I say that I do. “What do you have?” she asks. I want to say, “German shell fragments from the Battle of Ypres. General Haig sent us across muddy fields directly into point-blank Austrian artillery. A horse collapsed on me and saved my life and I alone am left to tell the tale.” But I say, “Pacemaker” and she directs me to a gentleman who gives me a full-body pat-down the same as if I were being deported to El Salvador, and I am cleared to go to MSP instead.

Delta Air Lines signs along the passage tell me I am soon to get the “Me Time” that I deserve and meet the flight crew that will Feel Like Friends and receive Nourishment for the Soul, but coming from the Midwest I doubt this. An airliner is not a recovery center.

I take my seat, 3A, and please don’t tell me I have no right to a wide ride, I admit that I am privileged. No doubt a worthier person sits in back but there’s no time for sworn testimony and cross-examination. It’s only a two-hour-thirty-minute flight so suck it up, worthier person, and take out your resentment in a fine work of fiction that might put your kids through college.

A click on the P.A. and a calm manly voice: “This is your captain up in the cockpit. Welcome ––” and so forth. It is brief, has a factual ring, we’ll be flying 505 miles per hour at 34,000 feet, nothing about his feelings of awe at taking responsibility for all of our lives or the state of his spiritual journey, and absolutely no attempt at friendship. He sounds like a Midwesterner to me, steady hand, keen eye, someone who can fly into haze without trepidation, well-trained, no outsize ego. That is who I want at the controls, not the son of a wealthy developer from Queens who buys him a draft deferment.

I do not like it when the flight attendant reminds us that 2025 is Delta’s centennial and says, “I hope we’ll be around to serve you for another hundred years.” I doubt it. I’m 82. Why would my descendants be shipping my ashes around? Say it ain’t so.

I especially don’t like her saying, “Flight attendants, arm the doors for departure.” Have things come to such a pass that we need machine guns to fly over American territory? Is there a revolving turret on the roof? Why have I boarded this plane?

I have boarded it in order to spend a week with my beloved who is engaged as a violist in an opera orchestra in downtown St. Paul, performing Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” at a hall across the street from the park with the statue of Fitzgerald. Downtown St. Paul is in sad shape, like so many downtowns these days. Dayton’s Department Store is gone. My mother loved Dayton’s, run by a good Presbyterian family, and clothed her six kids in clothing with the Dayton’s label, following Paul’s admonition to the Philippians: “Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are of good report; think on these things.” But Dayton’s was supplanted by Amazon as prophesied in Revelation, that “a great red dragon with seven horns and ten heads will come among you,” and downtown is a mirage but I believe that great art can change the world and that it isn’t Required that Novelists be Drunks and I intend to sit in the hall and look down on the stage as Figaro sings “Largo al factotum” and see my lady in the pit, viola under her chin, making music.

I love the woman and I will take any risk to fly to Minnesota and see her and when the Count falls in love with young Rosina whose elderly guardian Dr. Bartolo intends to marry her himself and his man Figaro conspires to bring Rosina and the Count together and the old goat is frustrated and true love triumphs, then I swear there will be hope for downtown again.

We need downtowns; a website is not a center. You can’t build your life around drive-up windows. There is delight in Rossini not found in a mall. Fitzgerald didn’t need to act like a writer: he was one so push the gin away. Art is good enough. Find yourself a good barber like Figaro and tell him what you want and prepare to be very fortunate.

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What I go to church for

The Supreme Court is taking up the case of right-wing Christian parents who don’t want their schoolkids to be assigned to read storybooks in which gay persons are portrayed as normal, which reminds me of my childhood when my parents wrote to school asking that, for religious reasons, I be excused from gym class for the unit on dancing. So for two weeks, while other students did square dancing and ballroom in the gym, I sat in study hall and did my lessons.

As I recall, it was no big deal. I didn’t feel odd or set apart or estranged. I snuck off to some school dances and found that dancing to Little Richard, the Coasters, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, was pretty free-form, not the waltz or foxtrot or mambo they taught in gym. I saw no moral wrong in bopping around on the dance floor with a girl. I was 17 and becoming my own person.

America has an old tradition of accommodating minorities. My ancestor John Crandall immigrated to Boston in the late 17th century, preached in the streets, was set upon by angry Puritans, and escaped to Rhode Island where he felt welcome among the Baptists. Quakers found homes in Pennsylvania. Mormons were persecuted in Illinois and made their way to Utah. I live in Manhattan where I see some kosher groceries. The list goes on.

I have idealist friends who wish to shield their kids from a materialistic acquisitive status-conscious conformist culture and so choose to homeschool the kids and live in the woods and not own a TV and discourage exposure to social media. I wish them well though I feel that isolation has its own perils but I do not express an opinion.

My parents believed they were doing good by keeping me off the dance floor but I’d suggest that history class was a more dangerous enemy, which omitted Divine Will from the story of civilization, and also science, which omitted Him as well. I know plenty of people who grew up in strict religious homes and who managed to relax their faith in adulthood, even erase it. Evangelicals who became humanists.

I am part of the shrinking population of churchgoers and I sympathize with my neighbors who prefer to sleep late on Sunday, drink coffee in their pajamas, read the Times and bitch about the stupidity in high places, do the crossword puzzle, and figure out a three-letter word for “self.” I do not feel superior, walking up the steps to the sanctuary in my suit and tie, taking a bulletin from the usher, putting my offering in the basket, and kneeling in the pew. I do not feel proud to be there. Don’t imagine God putting a checkmark by my name. I am aware of my shortcomings. I could list them for you here but there isn’t enough room.

I join my voice to the voices around me in the hymns and prayers and the creed. We praise our Creator and acknowledge His love and give thanks for His gifts, His endless goodness. All week I’ve been walking around inside myself and this hour on Sunday morning is when I disappear and feel joined to the world around me. I think tenderly of those I love and I also pray for my enemies. This is the heart of my faith: love, kindness, charity, sitting with head bowed in a beautiful quiet corner of the biggest busiest city in America, in a Jewish neighborhood, a block north of a Hispanic Catholic church, a Buddhist temple and a Muslim temple and Hindu temple within walking distance, in a city where same-sex couples are a common sight, and I pray for those whom I need and love. Religious doctrine does not cross my mind, not even a wisp or whisper. I feel lightened, lifted, buoyant. We sing the closing hymn, our hands raised on the chorus, “And I will raise them up on the last day.”

I slip out of the pew, I give a fist bump to the deacon who read the Gospel, I thank the priest for the good word, and I head out into Manhattan and walk home. I pass the Hispanic church, parishioners gathered around a priest. I pass the Korean Baptist church. A jerk on a Harley goes blasting past down Columbus Avenue. A chopper full of tourists goes overhead at low altitude, chopchopchopchop, and I send them a silent message: “New York is not about rooftops, it’s about people. Walk around. Maybe come to church.”

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On the road, thinking about Dora

I stayed in an old hotel in Northampton, Mass., last week, one with a glass U.S. Mail chute running from the top floor to the lobby, a sweet reminder of olden times when guests might’ve sat at a desk in their hotel room and written letters with fountain pens on hotel stationery to friends or relatives, but now people text those messages so no letters fluttered down the chute and there it is, one more useless artifact just like you and I will be someday if we aren’t already.

I’m not nostalgic. I’m quite aware that back in those fountain pen days plenty of people were conking out from the congenital heart defect that Mayo surgeons fixed very nicely and also from strokes that anti-seizure meds prevent and I also know that people we call “special needs” were miserably treated as cattle and now a growing army of teachers and therapists are dedicated to creating humane programs to enable them to grow and thrive and live good lives. We have one in our family and her happiness makes me happy; I hear her talk about her busy day and her job and her friends and I say, “God bless America for its goodness to humans who could easily be shoved to the side.”

My grandma Dora, born in 1880, a seamstress and Western Union telegrapher and schoolteacher and farm wife, was progressive, not nostalgic. She came from abolitionist stock and was deeply disappointed that her dad wouldn’t take her to the Chicago Exposition of 1893 where she hoped to see the moving sidewalk, motion pictures, the Ferris wheel, and hear recordings of the human voice. Her heroes were George Washington Carver and Einstein. Grandma came to our house when she was 82, my age now, and she watched TV covering John Glenn’s ride in orbit around the Earth and Grandma said she was sure that man would land on the moon someday and she was sorry she wouldn’t be here to see it.

No, Grandma was definitely forward-thinking and wanted her descendants to get to work making a better world and I have a good idea which of my cousins she’d be most proud of, such as Matt and Michael who worked in medical engineering and my brother who worked to prevent nuclear waste pollution and Betty the psychologist and Richard the architect, and I assure you she’d not be bragging up her grandson the radio humorist. Grandma was not interested in show biz; she didn’t want to go to Chicago to see Little Egypt dance the “hootchie-kootchie” on the Midway. No, ma’am. Grandma wanted to see the wonders that the human mind could conjure up to make life better and longer and healthier.

I wish Grandma could’ve seen the show I did in Nashua, N.H., a week ago. I don’t know what she would’ve thought about the jokes but I talked about her respect for memorization, which she required of her pupils, and I recited Shakespeare and Frost and Housman, poems I’d learned back in my teen years that stick with me, also an erotic sonnet of my own and a string of lowbrow limericks. I stood there reciting for 800 people but really it was for Grandma Dora. I led the audience in singing “My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,” which Grandma surely knew by heart and the audience sang it with passion and I saw nobody, absolutely not a soul, google it on their cellphone.

I’m an old man and I’m still trying to impress my grandma though now she’s become a contemporary. She would be saddened by my two divorces and she would love my wife who is independent and practical and loving and forgiving and she’d be stunned by Jenny playing Rossini at the opera and “Giselle” at the ballet, but this crowd happily singing by heart a great national song about freedom and justice would exhilarate Grandma as it does me.

The anthem by Julia Ward Howe,

When sung by an audience — wow.

The Lord’s judgment seat,

The jubilant feet,

I wish we could hear it right now.

My nephew Matt worked on the development of the porcine heart valve, roaming from Minnesota to Norway to Germany to France to find new colleagues, and now this valve is keeping me going. It wasn’t developed so I could play more golf. No. So I’ll keep going and try to make Dora Powell proud. No easy task.

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A happy man out for a drive

I’m fond of progress. We used to drive around with a big road map spread out and yell, “I told you to turn west a half mile ago, ya dummy,” and now a robolady is our navigator directing us in gentle tones and road trips are more enjoyable. I make impulsive phone calls to distant friends as Alexa is guiding us through Connecticut and say, “Hi, Marcia, how’s it going?” and due to bandwidth or magnetic resonance or the Earth’s rotation, I know I won’t get a bill for $85 from AT&T. This is still a source of wonder to an old coot like me.

And instead of having a back seat full of encyclopedias and atlases and dictionaries, I just google “Hartford” and read about its history.

And most important: I am 23 years older than my uncles who died from the same congenital heart defect I had, a gift of time, and I am permanently grateful to my surgeons Dr. Orszulak and Dr. Dearani and the Mayo Clinic and the anonymous wonks who did the tedious labor in sterile laboratories similar to the research labs the World’s Richest Nazi is now slamming shut whenever the mood strikes him.

Medical researchers who marshal the data from extensive tests, share their findings with other wonks, scramble for funding to do the research that will lead to procedures and pharmaceuticals that will change lives, getting no credit for their work, and now they live in fear of a car dealer from South Africa. Weird. But I just go on having a good time.

I’m a happy man, rather sane,

Who’s avoiding gin and cocaine,

And agitation

Although on occasion

I like to take walks in the rain.

But I worry about the kids. My generation is fading away, and the kids who type 50 wpm with their thumbs on a cellphone are becoming prominent but will they have the chance to be as wildly lucky as I’ve been? The sun comes up and the sun sets due to the Earth’s rotation, the Mississippi runs into the gulf and you can call it whatever you want to, it’s the same gulf, and as Solomon said, “What is is what has been and what shall be, there is nothing new under the sun,” except that we find ourselves with a president who seems to have no idea what he’s doing, and every morning my wife puts the newspaper down and says, “You won’t believe this,” but I do. The man feels obliged to astonish us with wild irregularities but it keeps getting harder. He could turn the Rose Garden into a Tesla lot and the East Room into a casino and paint the White House mauve and we’d say, “Well, that’s him doing his thing.” The only thing that would amaze us is if he wore a green tie.

The man is unable to tell a joke or to apologize or express sympathy and he demands absolute obedience. His executive order forbidding “divisive narratives” eliminated slavery and the confiscation of Native land from our national history, they never happened, just as Disney does not show ducks or mice using bad words.

His order to allow full water pressure in showerheads I can go along with: our shower volume is controlled by a faucet so I can choose to conserve water if I wish. I do not yet support our acquisition of Greenland by force and having to face the insidious Danes and nor do I see a need to Americanize Canada and teach 41 million people the Pledge of Allegiance and “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

I’m willing to listen to reason. Like most Americans, I don’t like the idea of radical Marxist troublemakers in the federal judiciary but feel that through due process these things can be worked out.

Meanwhile my wife says, “Listen to this” and I listen. What is beyond the man’s capability? Declaring a national emergency and dismissing the Supreme Court? Deporting George Will? Evidently the American military will put on a triumphal parade on his birthday with parachutists landing on the Ellipse and the marching bands of all the services and tanks rumbling up Pennsylvania Avenue.

I would not want to be the person in charge of hiring the cheering crowds along the route and making sure they cheer and that no divisive banners are held up over people’s heads, but I pulled the plug on the guy long ago. I’ll be living my life.

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On the road doing shows for Holy Week

I grew up fundamentalist so we didn’t do Easter and our little girls didn’t get bright new pastel jackets and lace bonnets and white gloves because we celebrated Christ’s resurrection all year round, not only in April, but now I’m Episcopalian and so I find fresh flowers in church and a buoyant mood, the hymns are of a hallelujah nature, the pews are packed, and during the Exchange of Peace when we usually shake hands, there may be some hugging. Sanctified Brethren were not huggers. We thought it might lead to dancing.

You can take the boy out of the Brethren but you can’t take the Brethren out of the boy and sometimes my wife looks at me and says, “Please smile” and I do but only for a moment. I go through life with the demeanor of a pallbearer and I’m almost 83. There are very few photographs of me smiling and the smiles strike me as forced. Inside, I’m generally rather happy or at least content, I love this woman, am grateful for my life, which has been elongated by open-heart surgery (thank you, Dr. Orszulak and Dr. Dearani) and anti-seizure meds and blood thinner, enjoy my work, am glad that I long ago quit smoking and drinking and gave up golf. But I look like a man whose dog died, though I haven’t had a dog for fifty years. Dogs are wary of me, probably feeling I will chastise them for their iniquities.

Is there cosmetic surgery that can repair a fundamentalist face? Some liposuction to loosen the lips and collagen injections to make a reliable grin with a guarantee it wouldn’t eventually turn into a smirk or leer?

Seriously, I believe in Easter, whatever terms you use — resurrection, transformation, metamorphosis, conversion, renewal — the opportunity for a person to shed pretense and delusion and resentment and be free — it’s never too late, that the 80s can be the best time of your life — that Donald John Trump could become a nice person, learn how to apologize, to express sympathy, pet a dog, tell a joke, pick up a small child and talk to it, take up folk dancing, lead men’s Bible study, not refer to his critics as scumbags. I honestly do. I believe the South African car dealer could become a philanthropist, give his little boy a name, adopt stray animals, join the Bible study group.

I went through a transformation in my mid-twenties, nothing so dramatic as those, but I dumped my undergraduate English lit courses that taught that great literature is weepy, jittery, gloomy, paranoid. Professor Foster lectured one day on Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which he said was a meditation on death, but I’d heard Frost recite it once and clearly it was a poem about stopping by woods on a snowy evening. The profs didn’t teach Mark Twain or Dickens. And they ignored Chaucer, The Miller’s Tale, the young Absolon singing to Alisoun one night at her bedroom window and she lets him kiss her but she sticks her butt out the window and he kisses that and is furious and goes and gets a hot poker and comes back and asks for another kiss and Alisoun’s lover for a joke sticks his butt out the window and lets a fart and Absolon sticks the hot poker in him. This is the beginning of English lit. It changed my life. I started writing limericks.

Kafka was lonely in Prague

And lived in a neurotic fog,

Groaning and keening

And longing for meaning —

He should’ve just gotten a dog.

And so, instead of a career teaching college sophomores to despise poetry, I’m on the road doing a solo show for elderly people my age wanting an evening free from thoughts about the car dealer and the scumbagger. It’s a good life. And it wasn’t the result of an aptitude test or counseling or sitting in a circle of folding chairs with other people trying to find themselves, it was purely an accident. I have no ambition to be taken seriously, I’m just another version of the home health-care nurse, I go when called to people who need me. On Good Maundy Thursday I was in Amherst.

Emily D. of Amherst

Never was vulgar or cursed

Except when birds

Dropped little turds,

She said, “Poop” but that was the worst.

Bless your heart.

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Riding downtown to the cowboys

The family took the subway downtown to a dance performance as a favor to the one dance fan in our midst and she thanked us for it afterward. “Thank you for indulging me, I really loved this,” she said. People ought to do that more often. Me, for one. My wife and daughter leave the apartment for hours, leaving me to work in silence. It seems awkward to say, “Thank you for going away,” so I don’t.

I didn’t care for the modernist pieces on the program, the rattly shrieky unmelodic music, the grievous angular movements suggesting despair and panic. The Dow Jones had been crashing all day and I was imagining the three of us losing the apartment and having to sleep in the bus depot so I was more in the mood for tap dancing and tangos, dancing less attitudinal, more aspirational. But the subway ride was worth it.

We went downtown on the Broadway Local and the conductor was a guy who liked his job, you could tell by the rhythms of his voice as he called out the stops, and the cheerful “Watch for the closing doors, please” and now and then a “Thanks for riding” and tossing in notable sites, “Columbus Circle” and “Lincoln Center” and “Port Authority Bus Terminal,” the one where we’d be sleeping someday when the portfolio crashes.

Crime is down in the city, which my relatives in the Heartland don’t want to believe, but we have a terrific new police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, a Harvard grad who spent a few years as sanitation commissioner, if you can imagine that. Harvard grads are supposed to work in the Brookings Institution; she made the city cleaner by picking up trash at midnight instead of 6 a.m., frustrating the rat population. She’s spent 16 years in the NYPD — “I know it like the back of my hand” — and she uses the word “recidivism” easily, the revolving door, a handful of persons responsible for hundreds of crimes.

You hear it in her voice, the sense of nobility in plain old public service. So we notice more cops in subway stations and on trains, not parked in squad cars on their cellphones. Squad cars aren’t so useful in Manhattan as in, say, Manhattan, Kansas: the number of speeding tickets is rather slight, given the congestion, but it is reassuring to us citizens to come across cops on the street and in the subway, visible, good guys, maybe a little overdressed with cop gear, but still. The woman is an honor to the Tisch family.

The police presence makes us less wary, more aware of the sights, the little shops, the odd attractions, food wagons, historic plaques, passers-by expressing their individuality, the occasional historic hippie with a headful of Seventies hair, and then you come to the marquee for the dance and duck in, find your seats, and wait for the lights to dim.

They did Aaron Copland’s friendly old “Rodeo” choreographed by Agnes de Mille, with the fiddle tunes and the cowboys and ladies and the cowgirl outcast, and that was a hit, and then the woman next to me asked, “Are you a Martha Graham fan?” I said, stupidly, “I grew up more of a Billy Graham fan,” and asked her what brought her and she said quietly, “My daughter is in the next dance.”

And right there, that made the evening for me. The pride in her voice. “How did she get into dance?” I asked.

“She did it on her own, when she was a teenager. She loved it.”

“No orthopedic problems along the way?” She laughed. “You wouldn’t believe it,” she said.

And then the daughter came out in a flowing white silk gown that when she did high kicks made dramatic geometric impressions and she interacted with a railing and did some jittery and jumpy things, but when it ended, I stood up and clapped and yelled, along with everyone else. A person believes that the discipline and passion that go into creating those memorable twelve minutes, or creating memorable music or poetry or theater, will see us through the gyrations of the Dow. These days I’m a fan of journalism and I’ve read commentary on the current guy that made me laugh so hard I couldn’t talk. We have a deranged president. Republicans elected him and they need to find a home for him. Assisted living. Florida. A big patio looking at the Gulf of America.

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March, March, March into April

I lay on a table 95% naked last month while my dermatologist Allison examined me for growths and blemishes that might need to be snipped off and biopsied and as she did so, she told me that she had been a fan of my radio show in her childhood and she was curious about a song I once sang, “I ride an old paint, I lead an old dan, I’m going to Montana to throw the hoolihan,” and was curious about the meaning of “old paint,” “old dan,” and “hoolihan,” and had I written the song myself.

This is the sort of thing that makes a man grateful to have gone into broadcasting years ago. I took a radio job in order to come in out of the cold — it was Minnesota, I was a parking lot attendant at a huge lot on the Mississippi bluff — but here I was, almost naked, explaining a traditional cowboy song to a doctor, a free exchange of information. Life is good.

None of my classmates were Allisons. I come from the era of Barbaras and Carols and Sharons, plain names given by Depression-era parents in hopes of some future employment, but a new generation came in with aspirational names like Arabella, Olivia, Olympia, that opened doors previously closed. It wasn’t DEI; it was the ambition of the parents giving baby girls names suitable for actresses and opera stars. The fabulousness of Renée Fleming’s voice will help hundreds of young Renées become cancer researchers and rocket scientists instead of drive-up window clerks at McDonald’s.

My parents intended for me to become a carpenter like my dad and they named me Gary but I, in the eighth grade, decided to be a writer and gave myself the name Garrison, which is more authoritative, and it worked out okay. In fear of winding up in construction, pouring concrete, nailing up studs, I developed incompetence and now I need to ask my wife to tighten a hinge or loosen a flange, I am a complete stranger to the toolbox, and as a result, she takes the manly role in our household, she manages the finances, she drives the car (I have double vision), she makes basic repairs, she takes positions on foreign affairs and domestic issues and I am only required to be charming. As a Gary, I’d be replacing spark plugs and installing a new showerhead. Instead, I do this, what I’m doing now. I’m in the business of nattering.

Allison was a pro. She showed off her expertise by rattling off the scientific names for my various abnormalities and she snipped some flesh and sent it to the lab (nothing cancerous, it turns out) and as she examined me, I wrote a limerick for her in my head. (My form of carpentry.)

Dermatologists must have good skin

And are probably comely and thin

With no pimples or cysts

Or scars on their wrists,

And named Allison, not Marilyn.

It cheered me up, being asked about “I Ride an Old Paint” and I got dressed and she came in and gave me a big hug. I was brought up by people who hardly ever hugged except maybe children ten or under and maybe mothers on their deathbeds. Hugging was considered sensuous. And sensuality can lead to sexuality. Men my age don’t hug each other; some X and Z men do but we avoid them. If you, dear reader, throw your arms around your laptop as you read this, okay, but don’t do it to me should we meet someday. Allison’s embrace, however, was heartfelt, as you’d expect for a man who’d sung to her as a child. I doubt she’d give that sort of hug to a carpenter who’d just nailed together some shelving.

So I walked out East 72nd Street feeling lighthearted, even though it was March and a cold wind was blowing and I had read in the waiting room an article titled “Interrupted Sleep Patterns May Lead to Early Dementia,” which is not what a man my age wants to think about, and the nation is in the hands of a deranged executive out to punish enemies and wreak carnage in Washington, but spring is coming, I am mobile, my skin looks good, and when I die, they’ll take my saddle from the wall, put it on my pony, lead him out of his stall, tie my bones to his back turn our faces to the west, and we’ll ride the prairie that I love the best. A man can ask for no more.

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A few words from your elderly uncle

I dropped my glasses in a café in New York and couldn’t find them and a young man got down on his knees and got them out from under a table. I thanked him, but it wasn’t enough. I said, “I really appreciate good manners more than I ever used to.” He said, “I know what you mean.”

There’s a lot of ugliness going around. I’ve never been called “scum” or “sleazebag” that I’m aware of though motorists do sometimes curse us slow pedestrians in rough tones but now that national leadership has embraced these particular terms I suppose the day is coming when TSA personnel will feel free (“Is that your briefcase, white trash?” “Hold your hands over your head, buttface, and stand very still.”) and give us a full-body patdown if we object. Security as an excuse for ugly manners, we’ve seen it before.

Some readers have called my writing “garbage,” but that’s literary criticism and I don’t take it personally. Same with “I used to like your writing back when you were funny”: each person is the judge of funny/unfunny. But “sleazebag” and “scum” deny a person’s humanity, and now that they’re accepted in high places, we are in for a rough ride.

I went through TSA Security in the Richmond, Virginia, airport, Concourse A, and an agent said to me, “Is there a laptop in your briefcase, my friend?” and it was the first time in fifteen years that a TSA person had addressed me that way. And when I pulled the laptop out, he said, “Thank you, brother.” I was stunned. I said, “Your mother brought you up right, my friend.” He said, “Thank you.” At LaGuardia, TSA agents are chosen for their aptitude at yelling orders like prison guards. The theory, I guess, is that rudeness will make a terrorist flinch. I doubt that this is true.

Once at LaGuardia at a self-serve kiosk on Concourse C, I took a chicken salad sandwich and a Heath bar to checkout and couldn’t figure out where to hold the barcode for the code reader and the young woman waiting behind me in line did not say, “Get out of the way, douchebag, and let a normal person in,” no, she showed me how to check out, and I thanked her. I said, “Thanks very much for your help, I appreciate it.” And I meant it.

Sometimes I’ve stood at a counter trying to figure out where to place the credit card chip to make the thing beep and buy me a bag of peanuts, and a line of resentful customers forms behind me but they do not yell, “Step aside, scuzzball” or “Get lost, human sewage,” somebody steps up to take my hand and tap the card and make the transaction. I look him in the eye and say, “That’s very kind of you, sir. Have a nice day.”

Electronics have changed the world we live in. The smartphone comes with dozens of apps, each of them a puzzle, the instructions inscrutable, and it took me ten minutes once to figure out how to click on the flashlight. The laptop computer is so complex you need an M.S. in computer science to figure out all the functions, and when suddenly something goes wrong — your page shrinks to postcard size and the font is 6 pt. Caslon and you cannot, cannot, cannot make it go to 8 ½ x 11 and 24 pt. Perpetua, and you see an 11-year-old nearby and ask for his help and he clicks on Layout and RetroText and Alignment and Dimensional Manifest and Die Grundlagen der Relativität and your screen is back to where you want it, and you thank him and buy him a Fudgsicle — this happens to me often. The laptop holds all the secrets of the universe and I only want to use it as a typewriter and suddenly I’m dependent on a fifth-grader.

Does he look at me and think, “Scumbag. Idiot. Snot rag.”? I hope not. I am old and out of touch, slow afoot, living in the past, but that night in Richmond, doing my stand-up act, by way of demonstrating that we are one country still, I led 400 Virginians in singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “My Girl” and “How Great Thou Art” and “You Are My Sunshine.” They hadn’t done this for a while. They were moved, even the men. I saw a couple men dab at their eyes. This is no small thing.

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My weekly walk to church and back

We seem to be in a war against science and research, which is causing anxiety among us geezers grateful for anti-seizure meds that guard against us suddenly shaking uncontrollably on the street corner and strangers having to remember first aid from 4-H to keep us from strangling on a hot dog and when we’re not reading about that, we see news of low-frequency seismic waves that can travel for hundreds of miles underground and cause tall brick buildings to crash to the ground, which is disturbing to us in Manhattan, and then there’s news of Mr. and Mrs. JD Vance who announced their trip to Greenland to see the dogsled races only to be told, “Nobody invited you,” so they flew to the U.S. military base at Pituffik for three hours and Mr. Vance announced that Greenland needed American defense whether it wanted it or not. He did not change the name of the area to Pitiful.

An interesting time we live in. And Wisconsin elected a Supreme Court judge other than the one Elon Musk favored and offered large sums of money to voters in a bid for a win.

But the crucial news is that spring is coming, the baseball season has begun and I will wend my way to CF and get a broad view of the action, and I will do the last big outdoor Prairie Home Companion of my life at Tanglewood on June 21, and then, unless RFKJ allows dementia research to proceed, I will retire to Shady Acres and play Parcheesi.

I’m enjoying being 82 more than I thought I would when I was your age, kiddo. I thought I’d be cranky and irritable but I’m not. I imagined that if the U.S. government canceled research contracts for institutions that used certain terms such as “Gulf of Mexico” instead of Gulf of America, the correct term, that I’d be upset about it. I’m not. I simply find it of interest and I move on. If the Justice Department told me, “You cannot cast scorn upon an elected government official,” I would say, “The idiot doesn’t even know how to punctuate his first two initials.”

I believe I know right from wrong and I think about it on a daily basis and also intensely on Sunday morning shortly before 11 depending how long the sermon went. The sermon itself is sinful in that it falls short of perfection and sometimes the attempt of woman or man to approach God in words is so inadequate that it’s best to tune out and I do and sometimes write a limerick in the bulletin.

Was Donald J. Trump a recruit in
The Russians’ quest for a route in-
To the Oval Office
By way of a novice?
Trump pooh-poohs it: pooh-Putin.

But I sit up straight during Confession and I am disappointed by the brevity of the Anglican liturgy, spoken briskly in unison, which would be sufficient for a small child but a man my age needs more time. I envy the Catholics who can come in on Saturday and find a priest in a booth, his ear to a little window, waiting for me to recite the entire epic account. I was a boss for many years and committed sins of carelessness and arrogance and stifled promising talents and I was a pitiful parent and miserable mate and my memory is full of downright dumb things, not so much hell-raising as having been an outstanding disappointment, sloughing off on the writing and offering inferior goods to a radio audience, and I count on Confession to put the mounds and hillocks of trash behind me and start anew and by God it works, it really does. I walk home along Amsterdam Avenue and I look forward to the week. My fundamentalist upbringing trains the memory as to be accusatory but the grandeur of the acolytes walking tall and proud, the majestic woman swinging the censer, the vestments and candles, the stateliness of the King James readings, all work to stifle my peasant superstitions.

I leave the sanctuary calmed and renewed, honest to God at least for a while, and often I skip coffee hour because I don’t want to hear about the stuff in the first paragraph. All the way home along Amsterdam I feel it doesn’t matter. I don’t know about your church but in ours we don’t pray for stupidity, cruelty, and supercilious pride and smug disdain. I see dads pushing tiny kids in strollers and a mom following with a toddler and I pray for each of them as they pass me.

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