Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 65

The old man’s Sunday sermon to himself

Probably the greenhouse gas report of the U.N. Environment Program shouldn’t have come out the week of Thanksgiving, a time when gassy emissions are quite heavy in the U.S. and people are likely to use the newspaper for guests to park their snowy boots on, but there it was and the picture is bleak, perhaps dire. The planet is heating up at a rate faster than scientists had ever expected, the U.S. is turning our back on the issue, and most people are dozing comfortably through it all. The press leaps when the White House tweets but it doesn’t know how to cover the major crisis of our time, the slow demise of Earth itself.

Other species have undergone extinction and the only reason to think we may be exempt is the divine promise of eternal life offered to the faithful in most major religions. St. Peter tells us that God is not willing that any shall perish. But a moment later he says, “But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.” The very sort of thing the U.N. report was getting at.

In my experience, the Christian church comes down heavily on the side of hope and joy, Advent being its busy season, and it leaves the apocalyptic stuff to fringe groups. Norman Rockwell did not paint pictures of Main Street going up in flames, nor do you see a New Yorker cover of the earth passing away: we are a hopeful and humorous people by and large.

I grew up in a fringe evangelical group and when a good evangelist was in top form, a boy could smell the fervent heat and imagine hot lava bubbling in the Lake of Fire, a phenomenal experience very far from Walt Disney and Mister Rogers. It made me feel odd as a young person, longing to be normal, listening to Don and Phil Everly who dreamed about holding someone with all her charms in their arms and then woke up with little Susie and were in trouble deep, but the Ultimate Fate of Mankind was not their concern. I was devoted to their music and the vividness of longing was stronger than the abstraction of the ultimate.

And so it is today. The immediate environment engages us completely and the future is easily ignored. I am 77 and the thought of death seldom occurs to me, talk about obliviousness. And on Sunday, when we were visited by a pal with her beautiful baby, the child was the center of the universe. She is eleven months old and is taking steps, holding on to a chair and then launching out across the floor to her mother, her comforter, her dairy bar and wiper and valet. The child is thrilled by this short journey though she teeters slightly and must stop to correct herself. Walking at eleven months marks her as definitely above average and when she arrives at her mother’s pant leg, the child looks up at me intently to make sure I noticed.

In church that morning, we were told, “Wake up. Lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.” That was St. Paul’s message to the Romans and now to the Americans. In other words, “Stop lying to yourself. Get smart.” This child will inherit our mistakes and what will her life be like if, twenty years from now, it’s too late to correct them?

The car is stuck in deep snow and we are far from town and there is no cellphone service. We can curse our predicament but it will not levitate us back on the road. The answer is to start shoveling and hope for someone to come by who has a tow chain and a good heart. Meanwhile, our government has been devoted to works of darkness and it must be thrown out next fall, the whole gang of crooks and con men. This is as clear as day. I’ve spent enough time in New York City to be realistic about Democratic politicians, but there’s a difference between confusion and corruption. I look at this child bravely journeying across the kitchen floor toward her beloved and I pray that someone will come along to Make America Intelligent Again.

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What we did Friday night, if you want to know

Friday was a dark day though we didn’t talk about it because we had dinner with two young newlyweds and a friend who recently lost her husband, so we kept it light, nonetheless I could see the motorcade coming around the corner, the motorcycle cops, the woman in the pink suit, but there was no need to go there.

It was a happy dinner party. The young wife is French and we got talking about American colloquialisms and she was fascinated by “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” and “easy as pie” for which she offered “mettre les doigts dans le nez,” (sticking fingers up the nose), meaning: no big deal, nothing to brag about. Or “pisser dans un violon” (urinating in a violin), which means something similar. She was quite struck by “up fecal creek without a paddle” and “defecate or get off the pot.” And she was rather taken aback by “brown nose.”

Our friend Ellie is fluent in French and her husband, Ira, who died, was a retired judge who had married the young couple in our apartment so the French woman could get her green card. It was his last official act so they are sort of a memorial to him. I had had dinner with him and Ellie two days before he died. He was in poor health but good spirits and he managed to grill the steaks under the broiler and enjoy a glass of wine and keep up his end of the conversation. He was a joyful man and was very much with us Friday night and we didn’t need to talk about him. We just tossed idioms back and forth.

The young French woman understood “icing on the cake” (though the French would put a cherry on it) and “you can’t tell a book by its cover — the French would say “L’habit ne fait pas le moine” (the cassock does not make a monk) — but she was puzzled by “the birds and the bees” and “wash your mouth out with soap” and then her American husband said that his grandma had actually done it. “No!” we cried. “Yes!” he said. “I was smarting off and she told me to stick out my tongue and she scrubbed it with soap.”

It was a lively cultural exchange and so much fun, we served two desserts, some light French pastries and then apple pie, which nothing is more American than.

I didn’t mention 1963 though the day is clear in my mind. I was 21, walking across the University of Minnesota campus, and a man ran by saying something weird about the president, and I went in the back door of Eddy Hall where KUOM had an AP teletype and there it was, clattering away, typing bulletins in incomplete sentences. He was dead in Dallas.

It was a visceral tragedy, a graceful young leader and war hero picked off by a sniper in public view, and it hit everyone hard, a kick in the solar plexus. In the years since, despite a truckload of books about him and November 22, the day makes no sense. It’s a boulder that fell out of the sky. Like 9/11. Two days after that boulder fell, Ellie and Ira and I went down to Greenwich Village for supper. The air was full of dust from the towers and trucks roared past carrying debris, and we never spoke of the catastrophe or death, we talked about travel and children, everything other than the catastrophe downtown. All around us we saw New Yorkers doing the same thing. An act of resistance, to go about your business as if the obscene violence had not occurred.

The beauty of Friday night was the presence of the young that closes the door to the vast ghostly galleries of the past, particularly the parts that make no sense. They are water under the bridge. Brooding accomplishes nothing: you may as well stick your finger up your nose. So we talked about Thanksgiving. The young French wife is looking forward to her husband making turkey and dressing and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie. They’re happy as two peas in a pod. Long ago, we got kicked in the stomach. Why bring it up now and rain on their parade and be a wet blanket? That’s putting the cart before the horse. So I didn’t. But you are remembered, President Kennedy. Still waters run deep.

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Lighten up, people, it’s Thanksgiving for God’s sake

It worries me that I’m using GPS to guide me around Minneapolis, a city I’ve known since I was a boy on a bicycle, and also that I text my wife from the next room, and when I get up in the morning Siri sometimes asks me, “What’s the matter? You seem a little down. Would you like to hear the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3?” And I say, Leave me alone, I just want to think, and she and I wind up having a conversation about delayed gratification.

Too much technology in my life. I used to go to Al’s Breakfast Nook and now I go on Facebook. Thanks to social media, my handwriting has become illegible. It took me half an hour to decipher a note I left on the kitchen counter that said, “Why am I here? What’s the purpose of it all? Who needs me?”

But Thanksgiving is on the way so let’s talk about something more cheerful such as profound gratitude. I’m from Minnesota and grew up in a culture of cheerfulness. Now I’m old and have much to complain about and am grateful for memory loss. My mother did not encourage complaint — “Other people have it worse than you,” she said, referring to children in China. She also said, “If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Which eliminated journalism as a career and politics, music criticism and any form of fiction except children’s books.

My parents came of age during the Depression, when everyone they knew was hard pressed and scraping to get by, and you did not complain because everyone else was in the same boat. Mother darned socks and mended jeans. They bought day-old bread as a matter of course and shopped around for the cheapest gasoline and slaughtered their own chickens. Dad cut our hair. He bought cans of vegetables for half price whose labels had come off and you didn’t know if it was carrots or beets. They did this cheerfully. I found it embarrassing and I rebel against them by getting haircuts from barbers and paying exorbitant prices for produce raised in Guatemala. I buy fresh bread. But I try to emulate their cheerfulness.

We live in the Age of Extreme Sensitivity. People have been fired for looking cross-eyed at someone. People have been offended by books they never read and demanded they be dropped from libraries. You get on a bus and you remind yourself not to smile; someone might take it the wrong way. Disparaging terms such as “birdbrain,” “nincompoop,” “sourpuss,” or “klutz” are now considered elitist and can get you into hot water.

Lighten up, people.

Cheerfulness is a choice, like what color shirt to wear. Happiness is something else. Joy is a theological idea. Bliss is brief, about five seconds for the male, fifteen for the female. Euphoria is a drug: they give it to you for a wisdom tooth extraction or a colonoscopy. But cheerfulness is a habit. You do it as a favor to other people. You hang on to it despite heartbreaking news — the college boy who left the party drunk and passed out on a freezing cold night and died, 19, a nice kid who did one dumb thing and ffffft he’s gone. Management changes at work and the good boss is replaced by a numbskull and suddenly life is intolerable. An old friend goes over to the dark side and thinks that God has ordained You Know Who as Emperor of America and will brook no dissent.

Ignore these troubles and embrace the great American virtue of cheerfulness. Don’t be held hostage by the past. Look ahead and improve the day. When you feel sour, wash your hands and brush your teeth and you’ll feel a fraction better and from that fraction you can go on to exuberance and exhilaration.

I once bought a king-size mattress from a furniture warehouse and tied it to the roof of my car with twine and it blew off as I drove home on the freeway and I ran to rescue it and a big rig blew past me blasting his horn and I almost bought the farm at age 45. I’ve done other idiotic things but feeling the Doppler effect of twenty tons going 65 fifteen feet away made it memorable.

When I think back to that day, it cheers me right up. I’m here. Survival is the key to cheerfulness. God bless you this week and your beautiful family too. Be nice to each other.

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What I’m planning to do this winter maybe

It turned cold and gray in Minnesota last week and snow fell, which some people talk about as being depressing, but it’s not, it’s reassuring. The talk is ritual complaint, an attempt by people living comfy lives to acquire the dignity of suffering. Genuine suffering is on its way sooner than you think. One day we’ll be hit by a winter heat wave like the one that melted half of Greenland and then our real troubles will begin. One day I’ll step off a curb and my legs will buckle and strangers will call 911 and I’ll be hauled unconscious to a crowded ER and when I awake, I won’t be able to remember the words to “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide” or “Minnesota, hats off to thee.” It’s out there, waiting to happen. Snow is nothing.

I went to see my favorite musical, “Fiddler on the Roof,” Friday night and compared to Tevye the dairyman whose horse is lame and his wife sharp-tongued, his daughters rebellious, and the czar is anti-Semitic, and the show ends with the heroes getting kicked out of town, my life is a gentle glide path. I had 18 aunts, most of whom felt I could do no wrong, so I grew up with a sense of superiority, and it was in the Forties before autism had been invented or any of the other syndromes and disabilities with the three initials, back when an oddball like me was assumed to be brilliant. And by the time they discovered what my problem is, I was a success and it was too late for treatment.

When winter comes along, I don’t long for white sand beaches and flamingos and palm trees. Paul Gauguin means nothing to me, I prefer snowscapes. I’m a Minnesotan. Heat makes me stupid. This has been proved over and over. I’ve gone to Key West and Santa Barbara in February and sat in a stupor as reading comprehension and critical judgment dropped to a vegetative level. I thrive when I’m bundled up against the cold and working on deadline and dealing with unreasonable antagonism, like the lady at Staples who told me that I must fill out a separate form for each of 23 identical packages I want to ship. She wanted me to fume and curse and glare and stamp my tiny foot and I refused to give her the satisfaction. I smiled, said “Thank you,” and walked away. This is the Minnesota way.

I’m no good at vacations. I’m a worker. I miss menial labor, the potato-picking I did back in my youth. We peasants trudged along, bent low, dropping the spuds into burlap bags that we half-filled and then left for the pickup truck to collect. You worked for three or four hours and you collected five or ten bucks and sat around drinking beer, smoking cigs, and talking about girls.

I went into the field of fiction and wrote books, for the prestige of it, I suppose, and then it paid well so I couldn’t afford to give it up, and it was an okay life, but a lonely one: there is no camaraderie among writers like what I remember from my days as a parking lot attendant. I was 18, I worked early mornings on a 10-acre gravel lot, no white lines, on a bluff over the Mississippi, wearing a white smock and white gloves and forcing willful drivers to park in straight lines exactly where I directed them. It was good for a free-thinker like me to learn the skills of fascist authoritarianism and bend others to my will, and when the lot was full, we attendants huddled in a shack with an electric heater and enjoyed the satisfaction of a job well done.

Instead of a sunny beach under the palm trees, I’d love a vacation at a work camp in northern Minnesota where an old man could park cars, drive a bus, or wait on table, three jobs that I think I could do very well. Let the snow fall and the wind blow, I’d be with other old men who find pleasure in usefulness. Our wives would be on Maui and we’d be in Bemidji, getting along very nicely, thank you. Before my legs buckle and I wind up forgetting the words to favorite songs, I intend to do this. First I need to explain it to my wife and then I’m all set.

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What i’m planning to do this winter maybe

It turned cold and gray in Minnesota last week and snow fell, which some people talk about as being depressing, but it’s not, it’s reassuring. The talk is ritual complaint, an attempt by people living comfy lives to acquire the dignity of suffering. Genuine suffering is on its way sooner than you think. One day we’ll be hit by a winter heat wave like the one that melted half of Greenland and then our real troubles will begin. One day I’ll step off a curb and my legs will buckle and strangers will call 911 and I’ll be hauled unconscious to a crowded ER and when I awake, I won’t be able to remember the words to “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide” or “Minnesota, hats off to thee.” It’s out there, waiting to happen. Snow is nothing.

I went to see my favorite musical, “Fiddler on the Roof,” Friday night and compared to Tevye the dairyman whose horse is lame and his wife sharp-tongued, his daughters rebellious, and the czar is anti-Semitic, and the show ends with the heroes getting kicked out of town, my life is a gentle glide path. I had 18 aunts, most of whom felt I could do no wrong, so I grew up with a sense of superiority, and it was in the Forties before autism had been invented or any of the other syndromes and disabilities with the three initials, back when an oddball like me was assumed to be brilliant. And by the time they discovered what my problem is, I was a success and it was too late for treatment.

When winter comes along, I don’t long for white sand beaches and flamingos and palm trees. Paul Gauguin means nothing to me, I prefer snowscapes. I’m a Minnesotan. Heat makes me stupid. This has been proved over and over. I’ve gone to Key West and Santa Barbara in February and sat in a stupor as reading comprehension and critical judgment dropped to a vegetative level. I thrive when I’m bundled up against the cold and working on deadline and dealing with unreasonable antagonism, like the lady at Staples who told me that I must fill out a separate form for each of 23 identical packages I want to ship. She wanted me to fume and curse and glare and stamp my tiny foot and I refused to give her the satisfaction. I smiled, said “Thank you,” and walked away. This is the Minnesota way.

I’m no good at vacations. I’m a worker. I miss menial labor, the potato-picking I did back in my youth. We peasants trudged along, bent low, dropping the spuds into burlap bags that we half-filled and then left for the pickup truck to collect. You worked for three or four hours and you collected five or ten bucks and sat around drinking beer, smoking cigs, and talking about girls.

I went into the field of fiction and wrote books, for the prestige of it, I suppose, and then it paid well so I couldn’t afford to give it up, and it was an okay life, but a lonely one: there is no camaraderie among writers like what I remember from my days as a parking lot attendant. I was 18, I worked early mornings on a 10-acre gravel lot, no white lines, on a bluff over the Mississippi, wearing a white smock and white gloves and forcing willful drivers to park in straight lines exactly where I directed them. It was good for a free-thinker like me to learn the skills of fascist authoritarianism and bend others to my will, and when the lot was full, we attendants huddled in a shack with an electric heater and enjoyed the satisfaction of a job well done.

Instead of a sunny beach under the palm trees, I’d love a vacation at a work camp in northern Minnesota where an old man could park cars, drive a bus, or wait on table, three jobs that I think I could do very well. Let the snow fall and the wind blow, I’d be with other old men who find pleasure in usefulness. Our wives would be on Maui and we’d be in Bemidji, getting along very nicely, thank you. Before my legs buckle and I wind up forgetting the words to favorite songs, I intend to do this. First I need to explain it to my wife and then I’m all set.

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Thoughts while waiting in line for coffee

I walked into a coffee shop Monday morning and stood in line for a cup of coffee, black, while people ahead of me ordered skinny lattes and half-caf cappuccinos and double-doubles and I didn’t mind the long wait — I was brought up to wait — we were a large family, service was slow. Waiting is an opportunity to think. I once stood in a long twisty line at airport security and in the course of shuffling along remembered how violent Pom-Pom-Pullaway was on the Benson School playground in 1950 and how I went in the library to escape being pummeled and fell in love with books and became a writer, all thanks to the lack of adult supervision. Had teachers kept the bullies under control, I might’ve become an anthropologist.

Three big TVs hung on the coffee shop wall and each one showed two talking heads, male and female anchors, talking about the news, I assume, though the sound was so low you couldn’t be sure. They were attractive people in a generic way and everyone ignored them. These faces are seen in cafes and airports and waiting rooms all over America, and I suppose they imagine they are playing a large role in the life of the nation, whereas their function is more like that of houseplants. They’re décor.

I talked to the woman who took my order. She is from Somalia and her husband drives cab and their oldest daughter is in college, majoring in math, and the second daughter wants to be a writer. And right there was the real news, not the silent noise on the screens. The real stories are all around us. I had dinner last week with two old friends and on Sunday morning, one of them woke up and the other was unconscious from a massive stroke and died that afternoon in the ICU. He’d been quite himself, jovial and witty, and two days later he was gone. So I had supper Sunday night with his widow and her daughter at an Italian restaurant Ira liked to eat at with his retired pals. He was a good man, a judge in the New York state system, a faithful public servant and also a humorist, as many people in public service are. It’s hard to accept his absence.

Compared to ordinary life — immigrants supporting their ambitious children, the loss of a friend — our national life is flooded with trivia. The Times reports that in his term thus far, the Chief Twit has issued 11,000 tweets, each one faithfully reported by all of the fake journalists. To a person my age, the verb “tweet” seems inconsistent with the Office of the Presidency, a cartoon word, coming from the beak of a canary in a cage. Winston Churchill barked and growled but he never chirped. But times change.

The advantage for our man is that he can twitter as often as he likes, including early morning when most likely his hair would be sticking up at odd angles and he’d be unable to appear on camera, but he can sit up in bed and address the nation with a few sentences and the Lying Press will faithfully report it, word for word.

The other advantage of tweeting is the brevity. Other presidents felt obliged to explain, lay out arguments, provide context, but you can’t do that in 280 characters, you can only mutter or shout.

In a year, after American voters have had their say about this vainglorious vulgarian, we’ll hear about plans for the Trump library — two words that do not sit comfortably together — which likely will wind up at Mar-a-Lago, though, what with his having governed by Twitter, all of his presidential papers could be stored on one floppy disc. Perhaps he will build a chain of libraries with shopping malls, each with a replica of the Oval Office where you can have your picture taken for $59.95, two-minute color video for $189.50.

In the meantime, nothing happens. The nation is mired in garbage. Congress is on a long road of impeachment that goes nowhere thanks to the fact that facts don’t matter and a quid and a quo are a quack and a quirk and he’ll be acquitted and meanwhile four trillion words will have been spoken. The theme of this presidency from the very beginning has been: “Nothing matters.” You have to admire the dedicated civil servants to whom it matters deeply, but the odds are against them. Rest in peace, Ira. We will make do without you.

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Memories of a citizen of Halloween

Every October it’s my duty to point out that my hometown, Anoka, Minnesota, is known, at least in Anoka, as the Halloween capital of the world, and it puts on big parades and a football game, the Pumpkin Bowl. Even as a child, I felt that a town of 10,000 was overreaching to consider itself an international capital of anything, but I kept my thoughts to myself. It was a big deal, even if people in Russia or China were not aware of it. In 1953, I saw the last living Civil War veteran, Albert Woolson, ride in the parade, and one year Hubert Humphrey came. Our high school drum major Dickie Johnson was the proudest, struttingest, highest-baton-thrusting drum major you ever saw. When you saw him coming down Main Street, you imagined that Pope Pius, the Queen of England, Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe might be coming along behind.

This celebration was organized by the town fathers in the Twenties, after a rash of mischief-making, and in my youth I heard stories about that from men who claimed not to have been involved but whose information seemed to me firsthand, stories about disassembling a neighboring farmer’s Model T Ford and reassembling it on the roof of a machine shed. It was a great feat, accomplished silently in the dark, the neighbor’s dog etherized, and my father spoke admiringly of the deed though he denied responsibility. I’d guess he was present, however. He also, without claiming responsibility, talked about the Halloween custom of tipping over outhouses and seemed to have witnessed it.

Most farms near the Keillor farm still relied on outhouses in the Twenties and Thirties and beyond, and people must’ve used them warily around Halloween. Perhaps they opted for chamber pots instead. But excretion is a personal matter and the outhouse offers greater privacy and so a person who feels colonic pressure might well opt to take a lantern and head for the little house out back.

I was a mama’s boy and privy-tipping struck me as one of the cruelest things you could do to another human being. A man with his trousers down, seated over the hole, listening for suspicious sounds in the dark, and there comes a moment when the bowels open and there is no stopping it and you are helpless to defend yourself as a gang of youths dashes up through the weeds, pushes the outhouse over on its door, throwing you off your perch, perhaps breaking the lantern and starting a fire, and you must evacuate through the hole you’d been emptying your bowels through and perhaps landing in the pit on top of your own waste products. I heard Dad describe this once to his brother-in-law Ray, and the level of detail in his story suggested firsthand knowledge if not participation.

It was fascinating to think that my quiet dutiful faithful father might have been involved in such hell-raising or knew others who were. I was a decorous boy, and couldn’t imagine tipping a toilet with someone in it. I still can’t.

But maybe I’m all wrong. There is meanness in the human heart and perhaps the annual night of privy-tipping served to satisfy the urge. Maybe you walked away from the scene of the crime, the victim howling in misery, and your conscience was strummed, and you became kinder and gentler as a result. Some of the kindest people I know are former football players. Once they ran crashing into each other’s bodies and now they are tenderhearted, whereas I, a lifelong pacifist, am capable of vicious sarcasm and withering comments.

What ended privy-tipping was indoor plumbing, not a Halloween festival. And though it’s a great holiday for people who enjoy impersonating evil and weirdness and disfigurement, the symbol of it is the pumpkin, a vegetative fruit of utter mediocrity: the best pumpkin pie you ever tasted was not much better than the worst. The pumpkin is merely a vehicle for nutmeg and cinnamon. As a symbol of town pride, the pumpkin is not a good choice. The door-to-door begging tradition is very sweet, especially for cranky old neighbors living in seclusion with Fox News, Facebook, and a freezerful of dinners. The parade of children gives them a glimpse of the future of our country. The young traipse through the dark, all glittery and happy, and hold out their sacks expecting good things, counting on the kindness of strangers.

Forget about pumpkins. Buy regular-size candy bars, not the miniatures. Celebrate sweetness.

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Where have you gone, Dave Barry, and why?

I miss the old days when newspapers used to publish humor columns, like Dave Barry’s — why did he go away? In Dave’s column, you learned things the New York Times didn’t print, stuff about exploding badgers or a man with a blade of grass growing out of his ear, or a story about the amount of methane created annually by dairy cows.

Dave pointed out the fact that men will never ask for directions and that this is a biological fact, which is why it takes several million sperm to find one female egg even though, compared to them, it is the size of Wisconsin. I laughed so hard at that, I almost coughed up a hairball.

Dave Barry once made fun of Grand Forks, North Dakota, for its tourism campaign, whereupon the city fathers invited Dave to Grand Forks, and Dave — this shows you what a classy guy he is — Dave flew to Grand Forks where he was feted and dined and taken to the dedication of a municipal sewage pump station named after him. The plaque reads “Dave Barry Lift Station No. 16.” Talk about a tourist attraction. (Who knew a small city needed so many lift stations?) You could go visit it if you were in Grand Forks.

Dave gave up writing a weekly column in 2005, and in 2019 we need him more than ever. Back in the day, humor was a relief from the serious, but now with our first preteen president, comedy has become the news itself. When the man twittered, “If Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!),” this was taken up by somber opinionators though it was pure methane. The fact that a man is the Leader of the Free World is no guarantee against his making skid marks in his shorts. A serious journalist is unable to point this out.

Likewise, the acting chief of staff standing behind a lectern and telling the press that, of course, politics was a consideration in withholding aid from Ukraine, and it happens all the time, and it’s appropriate, and then two days later, saying he had said no such thing. Lying into a microphone under bright light is an exploding badger, if there ever was one.

The Times is a great newspaper that gives you a daily crossword, reviews tons of books, offers expert advice on child-rearing, covers Congress, but it absolutely refuses to tolerate humor in its august pages. And so it reacts to White House whoopee cushions and exploding cigars with disapproval, dismay, disappointment, dread, which is exactly the reaction every preteen who pretends to york up his broccoli is hoping to get.

I was taken with the recent headline in the Washington Post, “Excessive brain activity linked to a shorter life,” reporting a finding by Harvard neuroscientists that diminished brain activity can be a good thing in regard to longevity.

Of course, it was much more complicated than that, as anything from Harvard would need to be, acres of footnotes and tossing in words like “aberrant” and “deleterious” and “prefrontal cortex,” and what the left-wing hippie socialist Post chose to take from the study is the idea that Meditation Is Good and we should all kneel with our foreheads to our ankles and murmur mantras mindfully, but what I take from the story is that the thousands of folks in the red caps who pack the arenas to shout their approval of every belch, every barf, every Bronx cheer are going to outlive us all. Their brain activity is only slightly higher than that of REM-level sleep. They love him, the withdrawal from the Syrian border, Judge Kavanaugh, the G-7 conference at the Trump resort (what’s the problem?), the quid pro quo, the whole kit and caboodle.

Our country is now in the hands of a man who takes care, several times a day, to comb those little skid-marks into the hair behind his ears. He lives on the Internet, which, as Dave once said, is the greatest advance in human communication since call waiting. He grew up in a real-estate family in Queens and learned that you can charge top dollar for tiny apartments made out of plywood if you put big chandeliers in the lobby and metallic wallpaper that is painted to look like gold. Good luck, everybody. Sleep well.

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The days pass, and now and then one stands out

My father, John, would’ve been 106 years old on Columbus Day and though Columbus has been taken down a few notches, my dad is still on a pedestal. He left us at the age of 88. He’d been through some miserable medical procedures and said, “No more,” and went home to his eternal destination.

He was a handsome farmboy, and fell in love with my mother, a city girl. They met at a Fourth of July picnic and were both smitten but it was the Depression and they had no money and years passed and one day he wrote her a long letter. I knew him as a taciturn man who never told stories or talked about himself but he was in love and wanted her to know it. So he described how, two days before, he’d driven a double team of horses to spread manure on a field and on the way home the hitch of the manure spreader clipped a horse in its hind legs and it reared up and the four horses bolted in panic and young John hauled back on the reins but couldn’t stop them. He braced himself and held on for dear life as the team galloped home and turned sharply in toward the farmyard, overturning the manure spreader, as John leaped and landed on the wreckage, suffering contusions, abrasions, lacerations, but his neck was unbroken. He wrote this in a simple narrative style, excellent penmanship, and then noted that he would be driving to town with his sister Josephine to help her select a bedroom set and that he hoped that he and my mother would soon buy one for themselves. A narrow escape from death, followed by erotic intimations.

I felt closest to him when I was 11 and accompanied him on a trip to New York. He’d spent the war years in Manhattan, sorting mail in the Army Post Office, in the building with the saying about “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night” on the façade, and he wanted to go back and see the city again. It was the first time I realized that not all soldiers were heroes; some of them had had a wonderful time in the war, had gone to shows and were treated as heroes.

We drove out from Minnesota, he and I, and walked around midtown Manhattan, and he took my hand. Big flashing billboards high above and all around us, theater marquees, crowds of people, but what I remember is my own pleasure that he took my hand. He didn’t want to lose me in the crush. We walked down into Grand Central Station and took the subway to Brooklyn and now when I walk into the station, I think of my dad. It was hot that night, no air conditioning, his friends in Brooklyn whom we stayed with were making passionate sounds from their bedroom. I’d never heard moaning like that and asked him if they were okay. “Yes,” he said. We slept on a fire-escape landing, to give the lovers their privacy.

A few months after crashing the manure spreader, young John borrowed his brother’s Model A and drove to Minneapolis to see his sweetheart. A few months later, she discovered she was pregnant. Her father demanded to see a marriage license; they didn’t have one. But they were in love for the rest of their lives, and after my mother died at 97, we found the marriage license: January 1937, five months before my brother was born. Now we understood why they didn’t celebrate their anniversary.

I’m sure the scandal made them more forgiving. My dad was a skilled carpenter, auto mechanic, and gardener, and I wrote fiction, which he found embarrassing, but he avoided comment.

As he lay dying, I brought my three-year-old daughter to visit him. She stood at his bedside, poking his foot as it moved under the blanket, and this got his interest. He wriggled his toes. She tried to grab them. He wriggled, she giggled. She tossed a ball to him, and he threw it back. She was delighted and the dying man was amused. The hospice handbook tells you how to make peace with the dying person but my father never went in for big declarations, except for that letter he wrote. I had disappointed him badly but the little girl was my peace offering. She kissed his hand. Had I kissed it, he would’ve had a coronary. I bless his memory.

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Unexpectedly on a dark day, light shines through

I sleep with a woman who is worried about the fate of the planet and so is trying to avoid the purchase of plastic and if I dispose of a Post-it Note she fishes it out of the garbage and puts it in recycling, which I go along with because I don’t want to sleep alone. We lie in bed and I look over at her listening to the CBC and a long report on the melting glaciers, and I drift off to sleep. When I go out on the road, I miss her and so I am a slave to her every wish. If she tries to convert me to veganism and I have to sneak over to the dark side of town for a 16-oz. porterhouse and cover up my breath with Sen-Sen, so be it.

But the other day she told me that cotton is a bad fabric, that to grow the cotton to make three pairs of jeans uses more water than a person will drink in a lifetime. And dreadful chemicals are employed in the making of denim. “What am I supposed to wear? Silk?” I said. She told me that silk is more sustainable. So is linen.

She is very conscientious, turns off lights, worries about the diminishing bird population and whether a person of conscience should fly or not, and reads every dire newspaper article about global warming.

But cotton?? I love cotton. Jeans are my uniform. I walk down the street in old faded jeans and a black T-shirt and I am 25 again, a young attitudinous writer. I am not going to take up silk pantaloons just to save on water. Linen is for old segregationist Southern senators. Not my fabric. She tells me that science has discovered how to make a fabric that is very leather-like, using mushrooms. Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom moccasins? What’s next? Broccoli briefs? Succotash socks?

It is discouraging to contemplate the damage my generation has done to the planet. We’re the rock ’n’ roll generation, the Beat generation, the protest generation, and all those people wore jeans. They thought that jeans were righteous symbols of their solidarity with the working class. To wear a wool suit would’ve marked them as management. Wool is better, ecologically. Denim is poisoning the planet. So much for self-righteousness.

I was thinking of this Saturday as I drove around lost in the Berkshires, on little country roads on a beautiful autumn day trying to find the town of New Marlborough. I was driving a rental Volvo with a dashboard that had me flummoxed and the GPS lady on my cellphone was yelling at me to “Resume the route!” and meanwhile I was low on gas. I’d been to Yankee Stadium the night before to watch my Minnesota Twins go to pieces against the Yanks, before a sold-out crowd of Yankee fans who booed Minnesota and everything else beginning with M, including modesty, good manners, mindfulness and their own mothers. In a just world, my team would’ve pulverized the Yanks and sent that crowd home mournful and meditative, but no. This, plus global warming, was all on my mind as I turned onto Main Street in Lenox, and there I saw the sight that redeemed the whole weekend.

It was a gas station. I pulled in, looked around for the button that unlatches the gas tank cover, and a tall skinny kid appeared at the window, and asked how he could help. I said, “How do you open the gas cap?” He reached in and did it and went to the pump and grabbed the nozzle. The last time I saw a kid pumping gas at a gas station was back during the Johnson administration. His name was Jimmy. He had a big smile. “Regular?” he said. I said, “Fill her up with regular.” The moment I said it, I felt the world become kinder and gentler. He told me this was his first job. He’s sixteen. I said, “You must be the best friend of every old lady in Lenox.” He laughed. “Forty-three bucks,” he said. I gave him fifty and said thank you.

One small kind deed changed my whole weekend around. Is it only coincidence that Norman Rockwell lived nearby in Stockbridge? Anyway I feel unaccountably happy that in America, there is still a kid pumping gas. Don’t give up, folks. Wear your jeans for a week between washings and save on water. Be prepared to be unexpectedly delighted.

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