Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 50

Dolts are dolts: don’t give them too much credit

The pictures of Wednesday stick with you — the mob rushing up the steps when the line of cops broke, the bozo smashing the window with a pole, the gangs of Trumpers running wild in the marble halls and the cops in confusion, the lout lounging in Speaker Pelosi’s chair — it was an assault of a few thousand of the densest people in America, a congregation of barflies and dropouts and people you’d never hire to look after your children, who were so thrilled to triumph over authority they could hardly stand it. That was the whole point of it. To roam around where you weren’t supposed to go, to sit in the Speaker’s office, and to take selfies while they did it. It was the high point of their lives.

It thrilled them that Congress fled and hid in the basement and they got to parade around and wave their Trump banners and yell and own the place, which is pretty much how their man feels about the White House. He had little interest in policy but he loved the security entourage, the chopper on the lawn, Air Force One, being saluted. He was ill-informed and had the attention span of a housecat but he was Boss and smart people had to kowtow to him. It was glorious. What fool wouldn’t enjoy it.

In those debates during the Republican primaries of 2016, old pols like Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio stared at him in astonishment — the man made no sense but he could feel the audience’s fascination and he fed on it. There had never been a presidential candidate like him. He was the 300-pound man who won the pole vault. He was an auctioneer with nothing to sell but he could talk faster than anybody else.

The dunces who occupied the Capitol for a few hours got a similar pleasure from their adventure. They got to cross the NO ADMITTANCE line and sit in the Speaker’s chair and put their feet up on her desk, and get photographs of themselves doing it.

When order was reestablished, the suits came back and were full of pious baloney about how the confederacy of lulus had “desecrated” the place by their failed “insurrection” and I’m sorry but they gave the mob too much credit. The halls of Congress are not sacred — the idea of democracy is, but there have been plenty of fools elected to that Congress who desecrate it on a regular basis without any help from the outside. The mob was a band of anarchists with nothing in mind except to cross the red line and take selfies while doing it. As the man said, “Be there, will be wild!”

That’s the whole idea of Trumpism. To call him “authoritarian” is to give him way too much credit. To be a real dictator, you need to have ideas, a goal, something going on upstairs. The man is simply an anarchist. After eight years of the overachiever Obama, people were amused by the idea of a president who was bored with meetings, ignored briefings, liked to play golf, watch TV, and perform for large crowds of people who loved him.

I talked to my friend George on Wednesday as the American Stoopnagle Society took over the Capitol, and he was so downcast, he said, “I feel sad for my country.” I tried to cheer him up, but he’s 85 and a liberal Democrat so he is often slow to get the joke. I told him that the crowd was only out for a good time. And a poll of Republicans later showed that almost half supported the assault on the Capitol. It’s a Good-Time Party now.

The man was an anarchist, out to prove that it doesn’t matter who is president, a potted plant will do just fine. Joe Biden is an honest and decent man. More people prefer that to a potted plant and prefer thoughtful honest people in Congress to old bikers and bozos. So let’s have four years of thoughtfulness and then let the Republicans nominate a springer spaniel in 2024. It could be a close race.

Democracy wasn’t affected by Wednesday. Georgia showed on Tuesday that democracy is quite vital. More than 2 million came out to vote for two thoughtful senators over a springer spaniel and a stoopnagle. It was close, but close only counts in horseshoes.

 

 

 

 

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A true story about last Tuesday and love and death

I had cancer for about five hours last Tuesday, from about noon when I noticed a hard protuberance on the roof of my mouth to about five p.m. when I went to see my doctor. I asked my wife to look at it and she shone a light into my mouth and was alarmed at the size of the thing, and made me call the doctor. It looked like a giant dice and of course I remembered that the singular of dice is DIE. Tuesday was our daughter’s birthday and for the ZOOM party I was creating a Mad Libs fill-in-the-blanks story for her friends to do, knowing they’d be eager to include barfing and farting and poop and pee, meanwhile I was brooding about diseases such as congenital pertussis, systemic fatigue, traumatic trachomatis, and deep down figured it had to be a deadly fast-spreading malignancy.

There’s not been much cancer in my family. Coronary malfunction is what kills us, but my blood pressure has been of championship quality so the odds would seem to favor cancer, and when I called a cab to go see the doctor, I put a razor and toothbrush in my briefcase and also my laptop and phone. I was sort of planning to go straight from the doctor’s to the hospital where a surgeon would remove the protuberance and the report would come up from the lab, malignant, and a kindly carcinogeneticist named Jenny Carson would come in and explain that chemo isn’t recommended for this type of cancer, it only prolongs the suffering, and radiation might lead to dementia, so she would recommend that I go home and sell the apartment and take my wife on a world cruise. “Get a Queen suite with a balcony. I gather from your questionnaire that you quit drinking fifteen years ago. Start up again. Have a gin martini. And start smoking cigarettes again. Sit on the balcony and enjoy a nicotine rush and get good and sloshed. Why not? And instruct your wife that when you die, off in the Indian Ocean or maybe the Pacific off Australia, she should throw you over the rail to the sharks and skip the funeral stuff and use the money to spend a month at a spa.”

I would be stoical, of course. I’m from Minnesota and stoicism is our preferred mode, living in an icebox state among emotionally repressed Andersons and Olsons, but I decided that on this world cruise, I’d write the erotic novel I’ve been eager to write ever since I read Henry Miller in high school, a novel with gasping and thrusting and throbbing and the woman crying out, “Oh my God” over and over and over, and the shudder of ecstasy and two bodies locked together in a chain of climaxes making your ears pop and your teeth chatter.

And then the doctor came in and looked in my mouth and said, “That’s a common growth on the hard palate known as the torus palatinus, and if it doesn’t hurt, we tend to leave it alone. In any case, I don’t think it’s anything to worry about. You could see an otolaryngologist but it’s apparently not infected and not cancerous.”

He put his hand on my shoulder and patted my back, and I took a cab home where the birthday party was winding up and people were still laughing about the Mad Libs and the barfing and pooping and all. I was stoical for their benefit, didn’t mention Dr. Carson’s advice about the Queen’s suite with the balcony and the burial at sea. I was quiet at supper. My wife asked if I was okay. “Of course,” I said. I realized that if I had googled “hard lump on roof of mouth” I could’ve learned about the torus palatinus and skipped the anxiety and the cab ride but on the other hand, it was fear of mortality that inspired the idea of two bodies interlocked, her skin against mine, various protuberances hard or soft, lips and roaming hands and her crying “Oh my God” and a person doesn’t need to book passage on a steamship for that, it’s available in the next room, especially now that she has imagined my demise and I notice her standing behind me, her hands on my shoulders, kissing the side of my neck, her beloved face next to mine, and I reach back and find her leg and now I am putting paper and pen away, I shall save the rest for the novel.

 

 

 

 

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The end of the worst, bring on the better

It was a small Christmas, stockings full of candy and also toothpaste and soap, and Swedish meatballs with lingonberries and mashed potatoes and creamy gravy. The wind whistled outside, the tree sparkled, and though we weren’t what you’d call “joyful,” we were in good humor and sweet to each other, and admired each other’s presents, the electric footbath, the brilliant scarf, the woolen shoes, the earbuds, and peeled our Christmas oranges.

In the late morning lull, we attempted to watch the Netflix “California Christmas,” which was a lull even duller than the one it was meant to fill. It topped the TV charts and was as bad as a movie can possibly be. It died quietly before our eyes and I imagined its enormous viewing audience was mostly made up of the bedridden and the imprisoned. My daughter said that girls she knew liked to watch movies with their friends on smartphones, each person watching a different movie, a scene I could not imagine.

It was one of those moments when you hear the bells toll. Gone are the golden nights at the Ritz or the Roxy, hundreds of us absorbed in the action on a huge screen, our mouths full of popcorn, surrounded by others transfixed in the same magic spell, and we hold hands with our sweetie and remember the times when we sat in the back row where certain liberties could be taken — nobody gets transfixed by a screen the size of a credit card and if the two of you are watching two different tiny flicks, he a shoot-’em-up, she a weeper, how will each of you know when to take liberties?

Will Hollywood rise from the dead when the pandemic ends? It must. Truly. I decided it was my duty to sit down and write a screenplay for a movie to hold a theater of young people transfixed for a hundred and ten minutes, but it’s no use, I’m too old and comfortable, too well-married. I live with a woman who sits across from me at the breakfast table and reads the paper and tells me what I need to know from it, which takes her five minutes, and leaves me free to think my own thoughts. I spend less time worrying about our democracy than I do trying to remember Natalie Wood’s costar in “Splendor In The Grass.” (Warren Beatty.) William Inge wrote that movie and he felt entitled to torture beautiful Natalie and throw her into a loony bin because he was an alcoholic gay male suffering from depression. I don’t have that privilege, having had a happy childhood. I write a scene and it’s two people remembering their childhoods. No drama. Dishes need to be thrown, tables overturned.

The world belongs to the young, and I am old and in the way, just like the U.S. Senate. A crucial legislative body holding considerable veto power and it represents the grandpas of middle America. The Founders imagined it as a council of wise leaders, which, if you look closely at Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Charles Grassley, and Dianne Feinstein, do you see? I don’t. The body would be improved enormously by introducing an age limit — say, 65. I speak as a 78-year-old, keenly aware of my own slippage. Without the woman across the table briefing me on important matters, I’d be wandering in the dark.

The chance of crucial political reform in my lifetime is less than the chance of the Statue of Liberty reclining in a hammock, especially with millions of Americans convinced that the Democrats stole four states. Democrats used to be adept at stealing but mainly in Chicago and the Bronx, and the Democrats of today couldn’t steal a small car if the keys were in the ignition and the motor were running. I know these people. They are too delicate for larceny.

So we are awaiting January 20, when a cheerful Irish optimist will walk into the woods full of Proud Boy senators determined to reverse an election stolen by Georgia and Pennsylvania communists. If it were a movie, you know that Joe would triumph. Bug-eyed chinless Mitch versus Joe? No contest. The man has a smile as big as an umbrella. The nation is waiting for that. We’ll be dancing in the rain and then putting the clouds far behind us and walking on the sunny side of the street to where treetops glisten and children listen to hear sleigh bells in the snow.

 

 

 

 

 

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When snow falls, can spring be far behind?

It snowed big-time in New York last week and overnight the city was transformed from gritty realism to a TV Christmas special, the city hushed and magical, skaters skating in Central Park and every sled or saucer, garbage can lid, flattened cardboard, employed in sliding. For the old man, walking flat-footed in tiny steps on an icy sidewalk, sliding feels treacherous but still the snow brings back memories of Minnesota and homemade hockey rinks, using magazines for shin pads and lawn chairs for goals. We had no laptops or video games then. Indoors belonged to grown-ups so we went outside for independence. It was joyful. I still look at snow and feel joyful.

As a Minnesotan, I’ve known people who felt oppressed by snow and cold and escaped, as people once escaped from behind the Iron Curtain, so they could sit outdoors in January and barbecue steaks and drink mai tais. I never longed for the patio lifestyle. People sit on patios in the sunshine and they yell at their kids and complain about schools and taxes and their neighbor’s lawn ornaments. People who sit in a cozy living room on a cold day experience gratitude. They pull a quilt over their lap and feel comforted. They look out the window at snow falling and feel joyful.

I went to the post office the other day and stood in a long slow line and felt endangered by the virus. In my living room, I don’t. The newspaper is packed with grim stories about death tolls and death threats against local authorities who impose masking requirements and long-term effects of COVID and I set the paper down and pick up Dickens and feel better. Nobody reads books on a patio; the light is too bright. Dim light is conducive to ratiocination.

The newspaper says that the pandemic has made Mr. Bezos richer than rich and is leading to the obsolescence of shopping malls, hundreds of which are closing, and what shall be done with them? Some say they can become nursing homes. I say they could become arts centers where unemployables like me can go to write, paint, compose, play in a band, and get a sense of self-esteem even if nobody likes our work except friends and family.

The indoor shopping mall originated in Minnesota, due to winter and suburbanites’ dread of downtown traffic, so along came this miniature Main Street of shops under a roof with acres of asphalt around it, but now Mr. Bezos will sell you anything with a click of your mouse, books or buckets, blankets, bicycles, buckles, bric-a-brac, boxes of buckshot, and one of these days, when he figures out how to do optometry and dentistry and psychiatry online, he will own the world. He will purchase the U.N. building in New York and, for a reasonable fee, bring about world peace and climate stability. He will own Facebook, Instagram, and the Sirius earbuds that will be implanted in every child at birth. I’m joking, I’m not sirius.

Life will get back to normal in 2021 but it’ll be a beautiful new normal. In a society in lockdown, social media has a lot of traction, but when the vaccines get around and life loosens up, we’ll get back in the real world of work, friendship, conversation, the arts, travel, church, and the mystical science of baseball. I expect to get injected in Phase 2, along with incarcerated felons, homeless, K-12 teachers, and critical workers. I am not critical, I’m only skeptical, but I’m an older adult with underlying conditions (depending on which side I lie on), and so by the time June rolls around, I expect to be running loose, shaking hands, eating at Murray’s steakhouse, sitting out in right field watching Max Kepler of the Minnesota Twins, one of my favorite players. It isn’t only that he is one of the few European guys in the majors, it’s also his quickness and readiness, but his Germanness is certainly germane. A kid growing up in Berlin who chooses baseball over soccer is sort of inspirational. I’ve been to Berlin and never saw a ballpark. If a Berliner could choose baseball and get good at it, maybe instead of being a paragrapher, I could be an oceanographer or choreographer. Or ornithologist — as Emily said, “Hope is the thing with feathers.” The papers talk about a dark depressing winter but I think about the right-field bleachers and feel hopeful. Thanks for reading. Be good to yourself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Enough of the news, onward with friendship

Someday we shall look back at these golden October days with wonder and amazement, how good life was even in a pandemic during a lunatic. Here in New York City, everyone wears a mask, there is a high level of civility, and though riding down Columbus Avenue feels like we’re driving across a freshly plowed field, life is good. I sat in a sidewalk café with a friend on Sunday, unmasked, telling old stories, enjoying freedom of speech. She complained about the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature: “I wrote poems like hers when I was in the ninth grade. ‘The leaves are turning brown, the leaves are falling, death is near.’ Who put the Swedes in charge of literature?”

Back in Minneapolis, where I’m from, you couldn’t say that. Too many Swedes around and too much PC and self- righteousness. Back there, among young lefties, I am a Privileged White Male, not a person but a type, but in my New York neighborhood, which tends Jewish, an old WASP is sort of a novelty. I walk around amid all colors and ethnicities and interesting accents and hairstyles, and I’m just a guy in jeans and a black T-shirt. This is a big relief. One big pleasure of urban life is looking at other people and it’s hard to do that if they are glaring at you as a symbol of all that is wrong. New Yorkers don’t.

Of course, life is easier for me now that I’ve quit reading the news. There’s nothing new in it, nothing to be learned, and hasn’t been since March. Once you cut out the news, the lives of friends and family become preeminent, their voices on the telephone, their emails. The brother-in-law, bedridden in Boston, who is on his third pass through Shakespeare’s plays, keeping his mind active while living in an inert body. The psychologist cousin in Detroit, a shrewd judge of my character, every visit is illuminating. The friend who, at 85, claims to be dying but still enjoys his evening martini and laughs hard at old jokes. The musician friends, unemployed since the pandemic began, making interesting domestic lives for themselves. The writer friends, writing away.

I am working on a letter to an old editor of mine, now 100 years old, hale and hearty, who bought a story of mine back in 1969 for a prestigious magazine. That publication earned me a slot in status-conscious public radio; it was my ticket. Looking back, I see that had he sent a rejection letter, I’d be retired from a career as a parking lot attendant, living in a small green trailer at the end of a dirt road, a big hand-painted Trespassers Will Be Attacked By Large Dogs sign beside it. Instead, I’m publishing a memoir soon and grateful for having had a life worth memoirizing.

The book won’t sell well because it is short on trauma. I didn’t struggle with drink, or suffer from syndromes that I was aware of. My only trauma this week was shopping in a drugstore where half the goods are in locked compartments so, shopping for deodorant, shampoo, razor blades, and artificial tears, I had to ask a staff person to unlock four separate compartments, and she was overworked and rather irked and tried to avoid me. This is a manageable trauma, along with the restaurant deliverymen on bicycles who go whizzing through red lights. It is nothing, really, compared to the pleasure of telephone friendship.

I talked to a couple friends about getting together to sing duets. I miss the old maudlin songs like the one in which Benny dies in Mother’s arms while Papa is drunk in the barroom and “let your teardrops kiss the flowers on my grave,” songs that have always cheered me up. I don’t sing them ironically, I sing them with sincere feeling. To stand next to a friend and sing in two-part harmony about death is to hold powerful opposing ideas simultaneously and life is enlarged by it.

The news is noise. I’ll remember October for the pleasure of long phone conversations and for the sweetness of marital confinement. She is one of the two people in the world I’m permitted to embrace and I enjoy doing it, over and over. I could arise and walk across the room and do it right now and I shall, as soon as I come to the end of this sentence.

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A word from an old WASP, awaiting winter

The gorgeous October days go parading by and you know they will end and then there’s one more, warm and golden, the Van Gogh trees, the Renoir sky: it’s beautiful but I’m an old white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male, the demographic responsible for the mess we’re in and all the messes before it. So I prefer to stay indoors. I wear a mask, the largest one I can find. Social distancing comes naturally to me — I’ve been emotionally distant since childhood. My parents weren’t huggers, they patted the dog and I guess we were supposed to extrapolate from that.

I’m 78. I’m heading into the Why Am I Here years, when you walk into a room and try to remember what you came for.

It’s a strange world. I remember when only carnival workers had tattoos and now I see nice young people with spiderwebs on their necks, or faces on their forearms. I grew up with four channels of TV, and now there are hundreds. You could watch twenty-four hours a day and barely scrape the surface. And what sort of life would it be? So I don’t watch anything and thus I don’t know who celebrities are anymore. Pop music is childish, standup is vulgar, movies are about explosives. Any recent teenage immigrant is more in tune with the culture than I am.

I don’t read books. The fiction is all by young people, heavily introspective, and if there’s an old white guy in a novel, he is sleazy but not smart enough to be a threat. The memoirs are by people under 40 who grew up dyslexic, anorexic, trisexual, and Missouri Synod in Texas. Once we produced great presidents such as Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt, and now the current guy is crowding Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan at the bottom of the pile. He is no more Protestant than Jujubes are Jewish, but he’s old and white and so I feel people hold me responsible for him. Everywhere I go, he comes up in the conversation: why? Why can’t we talk about something else?

The world belongs to the young and they gather in big crowds, unmasked, arms draped around each other, as the vodka is passed around along with the virus, which is just plain wrong, but then so is a great deal else. Like drive-thru liquor stores. When you buy a gallon of hooch, you ought to show you can walk in a straight line. But young people prefer the drive-thru, so there you are.

The world is changing. I’m basically okay with that. People of color, Black people, Latinos, dominate baseball now, not because of affirmative action but because they’re better ballplayers. Many of them have tattoos. Guys who grew up in South America had a much longer season. There are no great Canadian shortstops because it’s still winter in April. My team, the Minnesota Twins, has one player I can personally identify with: Max Kepler in right field. A slim white guy with a Germanic name. I don’t need nine white guys, just one. A token white male.

I was planning to be a comfy old grandpa who tells little kids stories about the olden days, but little kids today all have wires in their ears so storytelling is pointless. And my stories are about waiting for a school bus on a 50-below morning in the dark with feral coyotes watching from the ditch, a bus on which several bullies were waiting to beat me up, but global warming has ameliorated those Minnesota winters. It used to be, people asked where were you from, you said Minnesota, they said, “Oh. It gets cold there.” Now they say, “That’s in the Midwest, right?” Knowledge of geography is sketchy now; thanks to Google, nobody looks at maps.

I come from a bygone era when we all belonged to a culture, respected the president, knew the same songs. I stood in front of a crowd a year ago and sang those songs, about working on the railroad and Dinah in the kitchen, the E-ri-e a-rising and the gin a-getting low, the grasshopper picking his teeth with a carpet tack, and a few old codgers sang along and everyone else was looking for the lyrics on their smartphones. When you need Google to tell you this is the land of the pilgrims’ pride where your fathers died, freedom ringing from the mountainside, then I have to wonder, Where am I and why am I here?

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In a troubled time, it’s time to make a perfect day

It is a true accomplishment to give a perfect birthday to a beloved person and a whole gang of us managed to do this for my sweetie on Saturday, a day of perfection, beginning to end. She arose at 10 a.m. and went to bed at midnight and in those fourteen hours there were no harsh words, no snarls or snippy comments, no big spills, no spam messages, no knocks on the door by downstairs neighbors complaining about our shower leaking onto their bed. Instead there were phone calls from numerous people she loves, there were numerous small thoughtful gifts, there was a very long entertaining supper outdoors on a warm September evening with good food (but not too much) and lighthearted talk and some good stories and nothing about a possible constitutional crisis in November with the election being thrown aside by a 6-3 vote of the Supreme Court, none of that. She was happy the entire time.

Her day began with coffee outdoors with her husband and two poems by him, a sonnet and a limerick, he being a professional writer — were he a plumber or a podiatrist, he might’ve given her a bouquet of petunias, but no — and a cheerful conversation about small things, and some phone calls and text messages, and it ended with a FaceTime call from her brother and his wife in Minnesota with plenty of laughter and then she aced the Sunday Times crossword and got “the last of the Marx brothers” (Zeppo) and then a last phone call, from our daughter who’s away at school and in a good mood, who said, “Make me laugh” and we did, by whispering the word “diarrhea.”

I’ve never paid much attention to birthdays and I keep forgetting them and I have always pooh-poohed making a big deal of my own. I thought of birthdays as something you do for children. And I’m from Minnesota where we’re brought up to be self-disparaging. “Don’t go to any trouble for me,” I’ve said about a thousand times in my life.

Birthdays are an expression of love, nothing more, nothing less. Tyrants do not get beautiful birthdays like the one on Saturday: to be surrounded by sycophants and security men, with loyal followers cheering from the plaza below as you stand on your balcony — it’s not the same thing. Al Capone didn’t get a perfect birthday party; he was always aware of the snub-nose .38 in his shoulder holster. Lenin didn’t enjoy his because Trotsky was there, giving him strange looks. No. 45 isn’t happy because he’s afraid Obama’s was bigger.

My sweetie is dearly loved by a great many people who take time to let her know she is loved and that’s almost all you need. You don’t need excess. Look at what we Christians do to Christmas. So the supper Saturday was antipasti, no platters of prime rib, and some wine, and an opera cake for dessert, and coffee. No rants, no lectures. People told stories. A story about a son who celebrated his 30th birthday by going for a thirty-mile run and about a violinist having to learn to play viola in three weeks and about a woman interviewed on TV who had thirteen children — she said, “I love my husband” — and the host said, “I love my cigar but I take it out now and then.”

I must say, it helps to be in a pandemic, having been self-isolating for many months and anticipating more of the same — it makes supper with friends around a table feel like a great luxury. Life feels more precious, knowing that danger is in the air. Creating one perfectly beautiful day is a heroic achievement, all the more so for occurring in the midst of an ugly presidency and a savage disease.

And now we go on. What else can we do? Every day, these days, my email box is full of scores of pleading letters from candidates and they all say, “We are so close to victory but we’re being outspent by dark money and your contribution, no matter how modest, will make the difference and carry us to victory” and it’s nice to imagine that we can check the $10 box and help save the world, but meanwhile the great challenge is to love the ones we love and give them pleasure. It’s all about love and friendship. That’s what it’s always been about.

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A former outlaw appreciating the Republican life

In the spring, there was a shortage of vegetable seeds and now, I’m told, there is a shortage of canning jar lids. This doesn’t affect me, locked down in Manhattan, but it brings back memories of my childhood home, the half-acre garden, the big tomato, corn and cucumber crops, the steamy kitchen with the pressure cooker going full tilt.

As a child, I worried that we might be poor and maybe canning was a sign that we were. Our neighbors were not canners. The dread of the stigma of poverty stuck with me until I was 18 and went to college and actually was poor and took it as a point of pride. I was a poet specializing in unintelligible poetry, and poverty was a mark of authenticity. Geniuses were, of necessity, poor. My girlfriend, however, came from a suburban Republican family and over time, against my principles, I came to love them, especially her mother, Marjorie. She had grown up in North Dakota in the Depression, when dust blew through the windows, her father and brother drunk in the barn, and she set out to make a graceful life of her own and maintain a cheerful atmosphere, avoiding the sort of dark brooding that filled my poetry, and I stepped into the role of boyfriend and enjoyed their company, and gradually they corrupted me and instilled strong bourgeois leanings that an outlaw poet should shun.

It was Marjorie’s fault: I honest to God loved to be around her as she cooked dinner, her Rob Roy in hand, smoking a Winston, chatting about friends and family, prospective travels, nothing about happy childhood memories of which she seemed to have none. She had risen from hardscrabble origins to make a nice life, peaceful, no outbursts of shouting, no ugliness, wall-to-wall carpeting, art on the walls, no trashy behavior, good manners.

I think of her these days as the pandemic has imposed a small life on us. I’m old, I stay home to avoid crowds, we cook at home, our apartment is about the size of their bungalow — LR, DR, 2 BR, Kit — except they also had a den, which we don’t. I don’t know anyone who has a den these days. But it’s a pleasant small life that Marjorie would recognize, a life I avoided for about forty years of gallivanting around, and now I find, to my surprise, that I’ve become fond of it. I turn on the ball game, I pour a ginger ale and pretend its Scotch, I smell the chicken cooking, and I remember that gentle Republican family at home on a Saturday afternoon. Easily satirized but comforting nonetheless.

I was a busy man for about forty years, doing shows, writing books, and in the course of it I gradually lost touch with the world around me, social media, cable TV, apps, electronics, all the current acronyms, GDP, LED, YOLO, POC, ROFL, AFAIK, GPS, LGBTIQQIAA+, and I am an old man enjoying baseball, a crossword puzzle, writing letters with a black pen on white stationery, a dish of ice cream, a cup of licorice tea, all of which were around fifty years ago. The one advantage of modern electronics is that I can Google Jelly Roll Morton or Bill Monroe or Little Richard and there it is on YouTube, no need to pull the vinyl out of the sleeve and set down the needle. The more things change, the more they are the same. I’m in Manhattan but really I’m in a village of the Upper West Side along Columbus Avenue, the drugstore, the grocery, a bookstore, the church on 99th. Like most people who value rationalism and low blood pressure, I ignore politics completely and wait for November 3rd and hope for clarity.

Back in my youth, I wanted to be an artist and imagined this required a reckless life, big mood swings, unfiltered smokes, straight gin, black clothing, and now I feel that inspiration can arise out of quiet and order and a peaceful disposition. I hope so. In my youth, I wrote a great deal about death and now, with death in the air, I write about gratitude for love and music and work and good-hearted Republicans. God grant us more of them.

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The News from Manhattan: Friday, September 18, 2020

A quiet evening on 90th Street, a candlelit supper on the terrace, small talk. New York seems to be returning to life, more lights, more traffic, more taxis. Meanwhile the pandemic has given us a greater appreciation of what we have. I said to Jenny, out of the blue, “I love this apartment.” What I really love is the apartment with her in it but I’m from the Midwest and we don’t throw these affirmations around loosely. I love the small life of old age. We’ll probably travel someday but I don’t mind staying home. I spoke to a classmate the other day who has come to accept a life of constant back pain likely due to his football career. He and I went out for the team in 8th grade but I was scratched because of a congenital heart valve problem, meanwhile he spent four years getting beat up for the honor of Anoka High. I didn’t do anything for the honor of Anoka and here I am walking around, a little stiff but pain-free. I never took much interest in football, it’s a brutal sport but has such short spurts of action, it lacks the intensity of baseball or hockey. Baseball gives you time to anticipate, hockey is non-stop. I’m sorry the University of Minnesota decided to go ahead with a football season. Back in college, I don’t remember many students attending the games, it was mostly for alumni. Get them liquored up and hit them up for big donations. Boys who go out for football should talk to an old player in pain first and decide if they want to spend their golden years at the chiropractor. If you really love the game, you could sit down and write novels about it, earn a few bucks, preserve your body.

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The News from Manhattan: Thursday, September 17, 2020

This week and next, I’m in a studio recording my memoir, the audiobook, a unique experience, the author trying to bring his writing to life aloud, having to hear himself, and no chance of revision. The audiobook business is booming, thanks to people with long commutes, people on Stairmasters, people who like to fall asleep while listening to a book, but for the author/reader it is an intense exercise in self-examination, a little painful sometimes. You find gaps that need filling, big jumps in chronology. Stevie Beck was my copy editor so there are no typos, but reading it aloud makes me want to do a revised second edition. But I’m 78 and have other projects lined up. So – let it rest. I’m done writing my life and now I’m listening to it and then I shall resume it.

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