Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 68

Life is so interesting, it’s hard to stop

It’s a privilege to have a doctor of medicine in the family and my family has two, one American, one Swedish. We dreamers and ideologues need to come into contact with science now and then. The Swedish doctor told us yesterday she is skeptical of the American practice of routine colonoscopies, that the profit margin on the procedure is very high and the rationale is modest at best. I’d never heard skepticism about colonoscopies before; it was like someone bad-mouthing mouthwash. I’ve been pro-colonoscopy because it feels good to get cleaned out and the muscle relaxant is so luxurious and pleasurable, and health insurance paid the freight so I didn’t give it a thought. Interesting.

The American one is retired and so available for consultation at all hours. I got him on the phone the other evening and ticked off my pulse and he told me not to worry, it was regular. I thought it was but I’m an English major; it’s good to get a second opinion from someone who passed biology.

I am blessed with faith in medicine, which saves a great deal of time looking into alternatives such as naturopathy, homeopathy, antipathy, and sympathy. If a man with horn-rimmed glasses, a stethoscope around his neck, a white smock, and a framed certificate on the wall handed me two red M&M’s, I would feel much better very soon after. I walk into a clinic and the smell of the antiseptic floor cleaner is reassuring to me.

This faith saves a person from morbidity in old age.

Back in my college years, I wrote dismal incoherent poems about death, and then I grew up, I read Tolstoy, I sat in a car with my arm around a girl who didn’t seem to mind, visited New York City, found a good job, got some experience in the world, and morbidity faded away. I’m 76 and I own a cemetery plot and I think about death less than I think about the Gadsden Purchase.

It is grievous though to read the recent report about the gradual extinction of species and ocean warming and ice cap melting and what our country may look like in another fifty years. Vast empty office parks, tribes of lawless drifters, mountains of wrecked cars. The prophet Jeremiah was a dark guy, nobody you’d invite to a party, who wrote: “Hear, O earth! Behold, I will certainly bring calamity on this people — I will punish you according to the fruit of your doings. I will kindle a fire in the forest, and it shall devour all things around it.” Bad enough but when scientists issue a jeremiad, it commands us to pay attention.

But three years ago, a choice was made. The electorate turned away the favorite, a woman who read scientific studies, finding her unlikable. She had serious Methodist virtues but it wasn’t what the middle of the country wanted that year. I saw her clearly once, working a rope line for more than an hour, a Secret Service man holding her firmly by the hips as she leaned over the rope and reached into the mass of arms and hands reaching out to her. She was encountering the crowd and making it look personal, with the sort of discipline your mother instills in you: those people waited three hours to see you so treat them right and make them feel special and forget that your back hurts and you need a toilet. She didn’t do bombast, didn’t do playground insults, and she paid a price for it.

No wonder so many millennials are in a fury. You graduate with a truckload of debt for a liberal arts education designed not to upset you and the only job you can find is waiting on tables, which is hard because you attended a progressive school where rote learning was forbidden and so you’re unable to add numbers except using your iPhone and meanwhile there are newspaper stories about human extinction and an angry narcissist is running the government. What to do?

Do as I do. Take it one day at a time. Lighten up. Count your blessings: GPS, YouTube, Google, a vast assortment of craft beers and salad bars in supermarkets. Figure out who your true friends are. Hold off on long-term planning until November, 2020, when we’ll have a clearer idea of the future. In the meantime, dance when you get the chance.

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What I learned from window replacement

I am drinking coffee this morning from a cup that says “Verum Bonum Pulchrum” — truth, goodness, beauty — an impossible ideal, but it’s my sister-in-law’s cup, not mine. Our apartment is undergoing window replacement so my love and I are being harbored by relatives. She sleeps in a handsome mahogany bed that belonged to her grandmother Hilda and I sleep on a hard single bed in the basement. Separation is good for a happy marriage like ours. We say good night and I trudge downstairs and lie in the dark on a skinny bed that is like the one I slept in when I was 17. So I close my eyes and it’s 1959 and I’m considering my prospects in life.

I was a mediocre student and so I decided to skip college and join a Trappist monastery in Dubuque, Iowa. I was brought up evangelical Protestant but their rule of silence was attractive to me and if you’re silent, who’s to know you’re Protestant? (Or know you’re not that bright?)  So I wrote to them, asking admission, and got a gentle rejection. And that was my last attempt at sanctity. As Robert Frost almost wrote but did not:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood

And I chose the one that led to Bonum

And was refused, so I took the path

To Amo, Amas, Amat, and that was easier.

Celibacy wasn’t going to work for me. I craved the comedy of marriage: two people physically attracted to each other but otherwise independent and free to express it, sometimes sharply — a comic plotline. Being married, I needed to earn money and I went into radio because it was easy. My dad was a carpenter and he worked so hard, he’d come home and fall asleep reading the paper and have to be awakened to come eat supper. I resolved to never work that hard and I haven’t. That’s why I don’t need a shoulder replacement and sometimes I still feel 17.

Radio was monastic at first, sitting alone in a studio at 6 a.m. And then I started a variety show, with musicians and actors, and that’s where I got my education. The monk Thomas Merton wrote: “We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have — for their usefulness.” And I think of the big stars who came on my show and found they enjoyed being there without needing to carry the freight. Martin Sheen, the TV president, enjoyed playing grifters and palookas. Willie Nelson sang a couple parodies of his songs. Allen Ginsberg came and read Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and was magnificent. He’d been the King of Beat long enough and loved venturing into the 19th century. Don and Phil liked coming out and doing the Everly Brothers for a few songs, but they were happy to mingle backstage and be themselves. Meryl Streep loved to sing duets, old elegiac songs she’d never do anywhere else.

Chet Atkins was a household name who was a sideman at heart. He could come out on stage and blow the audience away, but what he loved was sitting backstage with Johnny Gimble, Peter Ostroushko, Pat Donohue, Bill Hinkley, whichever musicians were in the mood, and playing an endless seamless medley of swing tunes, gospel, “Seeing Nellie Home,” “I Saw Her Standing There,” “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” whatever came to his mind. That was when Chet disappeared into his true self.

This happened to me a few weeks ago, doing a solo show, a benefit for an arts organization in upstate New York, unrehearsed since it was just me. Two old friends came backstage before the show and provided distraction right up to eight o’clock when the stage lights dimmed and I walked out to the microphone with nothing in mind except to sing Irving Berlin’s “All Alone” and then recite Shakespeare’s “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state.” There was no script. I flew blind for an hour and a half through the overcast of memory, the False Knight Upon The Road, Frost, Blake, “Annabel Lee,” Frankie and Johnny, no pause, no applause, and finally at 76 I felt anonymous and free, with Dickinson, Yeats, the babes in the woods, Casey at the bat, the audience singing “America,” and I was a Trappist at last, not doing but being.

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Just looking out a window, thinking

That was the week when Uncle Joe referred to Individual #1 as a clown. It was at a campaign stop in South Carolina and it was just a little fundraiser, not a big show in an arena with thousands in their blue MAIA caps (Make America Intelligent Again), and Uncle Joe was careful to say he didn’t intend to get into a mud wrestling match, but nonetheless there it was — Clown — and it opened up a window.

So let’s look through that window.

I’ve been to Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and there are people there who, like me, weren’t good at math. I hit the wall in math in 10th grade. According to educators at the time, this meant I’d become a fry cook or a bus driver, but no, I discovered that English is the main deal and math is the road to obsolescence. The problems get harder, new math comes along, younger people take your place, and now I see my math-whiz classmates taking tickets at parking ramps.

Never in the past fifty years have I said to myself, “I wish I had worked harder in math.” A person can go for months without ever needing to work equations, but the English language is a big deal.

That is how Individual #1 came to prominence. He introduced to the highest level of government the language of the barroom and the back alley. Running for the Republican nomination, #1 called Lindsey Graham a stiff. “A total lightweight. In the private sector, he couldn’t get a job. Believe me. Couldn’t get a job.”

This was thrilling to many people who felt bad about their own lack of math skills. Nobody running for president ever talked like a gangster before and called for his opponent to be locked up. He didn’t bother with the policy crap; he was an innovator. It was like your pastor uses cuss words in the homily. It was like your brain surgeon walks into the OR with a half-empty bottle of Jim Beam in hand, smoking a cheroot, in a Carhartt jacket and a camouflage cap. All your other doctors were such elitists and this one has a degree in welding and a diagram of the brain and he is good to go. This guy talks your language.

So America is watching Uncle Joe as he looks out that window. Maybe it’s a new ballgame and a 76-year-old has to learn the rules. He already ditched the suit jacket and tie. Why not call the guy with the red tie Dumbo. Look him in the eye and say, “I promise one thing and that is that by November 2021, you are going to be in Guantanamo in a cellblock all by your lonesome self.”

Maybe that’s what wins northern Wisconsin and Upper Michigan and western Pennsylvania. In Madison and Ann Arbor and Philadelphia, you talk about global warming. Outstate, you praise the local football team, grab a brewski, and talk about putting people in jail.

But Joe will need to warm up in the primaries. Take on Comrade Bernie, Aimless Amy, Faded Beto, Defeated Pete, Embarrassing Harris, Foreign Warren, Chicken Soup Hickenlooper. Make up stuff. Keep changing the subject. Make illegal immigration from the north your wedge issue. Canadians speak English and easily pass for Americans and the border in North Dakota is a single strand of barbed wire. But the promise to lock him up is your trump card. No presidential candidate did that before 2016, not even Lincoln in 1860 when he ran against an out-and-out traitor.

“Send the ruler to the cooler.” Get your crowd chanting that and it’s all anybody will talk about for the next year. The nose-rubbing, the Hill hearings, the Obama years, all of that disappears.

But Uncle Joe closes that window. He’d rather run a campaign he’d be proud of and go down in defeat than go down in the history books as a mud wrestler. That’s what he’s thinking now in early May 2019.

Meanwhile, I have taken the precaution of securing a copyright on MAIA (Make America Intelligent Again) and “Send the ruler to the cooler” and some of the other ideas in this column. If Joe decides to wrestle, I’ve got truckloads of mud for sale. I went to White Castle for a bag of sliders the other day and the old guy at the counter was the smartest kid in my graduating class. He got a Ph.D. in history and wrote his thesis on the origin of the phrase “balance of powers,” and now here he is, selling fries and burgers. I put a couple bucks in his tip glass and he thanked me profusely. There is a lesson to be learned here, Joe.

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A few thoughts before heading off to dinner

I’m a man of considerable loyalty. I stick with a pair of shoes for years, and I still use Ipana toothpaste because it sponsored Fred Allen on the radio, though sometimes I buy Colgate in support of higher education. But I’m all done with the friend who invited me to dinner last month. He is off my list for good.

It was one of those wretched dinner parties where you wish you could say, “I’ve got to go home and take the dog out for a walk” but the hosts know you don’t have one so you try to think of something else — a plumbing problem, a plant that needs watering — it was my idea of Hell. Eight perfectly nice strangers around a table trying to manufacture conversation by saying, “I’ve been reading a very interesting book lately about” — prison reform, children with learning disabilities, global warming, income inequality, gender bias, the antibiotic crisis, you name it — a dinner party of book reports and I wish there were just one flaming Republican there to lend some interest, but no, this is a Democratic Hell.

What I learn from it is what a precious thing true friendship is. It is lighthearted and thrives on argument (good-natured), and it goes in for humorous mutual disparagement. Friends don’t stand on piety. They kid each other; this is the cure for self-pity. And so most of my friendships are with old people like me. When you’re young, you’re an unappreciated genius, a courageous radical, a lone pilgrim, but after you pass fifty and you’ve experienced a colonoscopy and occasional mental lapses and you don’t recognize celebrities anymore and you’ve been in social situations where you had to work hard to contain your own flatulence, you ease up on geniushood and are ready to have friends.

There is no joking at the dinner from Hell, just self-righteousness. And then inevitably, we descend into the abyss of a conversation about our unPresident. This is when I want to leave the table. We liberals take government seriously and expect high office to be a terrible burden, the lonely leader conscious of the coming judgment of history, and Mr. Casual enjoys the beautiful helicopter service, the motorcades, the honor guard, the microphones all pointed his way. What he has to say sounds like the average New York cabdriver and his followers love that. I’ve been reading a book about FDR in 1944, managing a war against Hitler and Tojo, envisioning the postwar international order, and the comparison between him and DJT is stunning. But the outrage he provokes around this dinner table is one of the things his followers love most about him. He drives my friends stark raving nuts. They say, over and over again, “I cannot believe that …” and so on and so forth. I don’t need to hear this anymore.

It would’ve helped if there had been a dog under the table, a living creature who isn’t concerned about constitutional issues, who only wants to be loved. A big hairy beast with large sad eyes who looks up at you in the midst of your sermon about the importance of independent bookstores, thinking you said “outdoors,” and wags his tail, ready to go trotting off into the park.

Which leads me to a profound discovery: politics can break up a friendship but politics doesn’t create one. Political solidarity isn’t enough to bond over. If we both agree about everything, then one of us is redundant. I know plenty of Democrats I wouldn’t want to sit down to have coffee with, let alone dinner. Some of them are running for president. They need a humor consultant. Or maybe they need a dog.

Dogs are more useful than cats. A cat takes you seriously and supports your pretensions; a dog does not. You are in the midst of a proclamation about the media, or the Midwest, or Mendelssohn, or postmodernism, and you hear a tail thumping on the floor, and it’s time for you to walk outdoors with your dog and watch it squat and then pick up its excrement in a baggie and dispose of it properly. One minute you are a prophet and seer, and the next minute you’re a sewage handler.

I’m going off to dinner now with my grandson and his girlfriend, two college juniors. He’s British, she’s French. We’ll talk about what they see in the future. It’s their future, I’m on my way out. My generation failed them. No big opinions from me. I’m here to listen.

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What happened in church on Sunday, I think

Church was packed on Easter morning, brass players up in the choir loft, ladies with big hats, girls in spring dresses, and when the choir and clergy processed up the aisle, the woman swinging the censer looked like a drum major leading the team to victory, which is what Easter is about, the triumph over death. Resurrection is not something we Christians talk about in the same way we talk about our plans for summer vacation or retirement, but it is proclaimed on Easter and the hymns are quite confident (with added brass) and the rector seemed to believe in it herself and so an old writer sitting halfway back and surrounded by good singers has to think along those lines. It’s right there in the Nicene Creed and in Luke’s Gospel — the women come to the tomb and find the stone rolled away and the mysterious strangers say, “Why seek ye the living among the dead?”

And then, on my way back from Communion, the choir struck up a hymn, “I am the bread of life,” with a rocking chorus, “And I will raise them up. And I will raise them up. And I will raise them up on the last day.” As the congregation sang, a few people stood and some raised their hands in the air, a charismatic touch unusual among Anglicans, and then more people stood. I stood. I raised my right hand. I imagined my long-gone parents and brother and grandson and aunts and uncles rising from the dead and coming into radiant glory, and then I was weeping and my mouth got rubbery and I couldn’t form the consonants. I stayed for the benediction, slipped out a side door onto Amsterdam Avenue, and headed home.

That’s what I go to church for, to be surprised by faith and to fall apart. Without the Resurrection, Episcopalians would be just a wonderful club of very nice people with excellent taste in music and literature, but when it hits you what you’ve actually subscribed to, it blows the top of your head off.

This was a good thing after a few days of redactions, acts of collusion and obstruction, corruption in high places, and the president saying, in a bad moment, “Oh, my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I am flunked.” Or something along those lines. The New York Times, despite being a family newspaper, decided that the Leader of the Free World deserves accurate quotation, and so printed what he said without dashes, and it was jarring to see it, over and over, except I felt that we were more flunked than he was.

Watergate was a minor traffic accident compared to this, but onward he goes with the full support of his party, and when you consider the likelihood of his re-election and what this would mean for the future of the planet Earth, as global warming continues unacknowledged for four more years and the Supreme Court is owned by originalists who will take us back to plantation days and a dozen countries decide they need nuclear arsenals of their own, it is a good time to go to church and renew your faith in a Higher Power who will not allow His Creation to be corrupted by ignorance, cruelty, and evil.

The good people of Lake Wobegon voted for Mr. Trump, just like the residents of River City bought musical instruments from Professor Harold Hill to keep their boys out of the pool hall, but if their man’s secrets are revealed, they might have to think twice. He’s a New Yorker who made his way up with mob connections, hung out with showgirls, was chintzy with charitable giving, and flaunted himself as Midwesterners were taught not to do. After 9/11, he boasted that his building at 40 Wall Street was now the tallest in Manhattan, this while smoke was still rising from the ruins of the World Trade Center.

But they are still backing him. My cousin, a good and intelligent man, texted me that the Mueller report was an attempted coup d’état by Hillary Clinton and top officials of the FBI. If the president declared a national emergency and called out troops to take over the Times and the Post and MSNBC and CNN, I imagine my cousin would go along with it.

So I stood weeping, singing, hand in the air, at the thought of being raised up. I’m 76. I simply cannot believe that this con man is the end of the story. I refuse to accept that.

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Old man cautions against faith in probability

I flew back to Minneapolis for the mid-April snowstorm, as a true Minnesotan would do. Eight inches of snow instead of palms for Palm Sunday, God speaking to us: not to be missed. What caused it, of course, was over-enthusiasm at a 70-degree day, people setting out petunias, putting away snow shovels.

Do not assume. This was drilled into us as little kiddoes. At Anoka High School in 1958, we had a great basketball team headed for State and in the first round of district tournaments it got beaten by a gaggle of farmboys from tiny St. Francis. Unlikelihood lends disaster a sort of inevitability: thus, as I board a plane, I think, “This is the end of my life. Goodbye, my darlings.” This acceptance of disaster is what keeps the plane aloft.

Other people imagine that if they exercise regularly and eat more fiber, they’ll live to be 98. I don’t. I believe that an exemplary healthful lifestyle makes it more likely I’ll be struck by a marble plinth falling off a building as I walk to the health club. I’m not even sure what a plinth is but it’s likely that one will kill me.

My grandma used to sing me to sleep with a song about two little children lost in a blizzard — “they sobbed and they sighed and they bitterly cried, and the poor little things, they lay down and died” — which is nothing Mister Rogers ever sang, but Grandma saw no reason to hide harsh reality from us. She did not tell us to look the other way when she chopped the head off a chicken. Death was a part of our lives. How many children today have observed a beloved relative swing an axe and decapitate a bird? Not many.

My fellow Democrats have been assuming for two years that our corrupt King would be brought to his knees by a keen investigator — and they are now sadly disappointed and wandering in confusion. Everyone knows he is corrupt — he himself boasted about it — he grew up admiring men who shrewdly worked the system to their own benefit, cutting corners left and right, stiffing the little guys, paying off the big honkers. Public service was never his thing, not then, not now.

Democrats are horrified by the King, of course, as most people are. He is compulsively cruel, resolute in his ignorance, proudly illiterate, and on the one occasion he was seen in church, he did not bother to recite the Nicene Creed, unlike the four ex-presidents in the church with him. He doesn’t believe in a Holy Trinity but rather a Fearsome Foursome, Himself included.

So Democrats have launched a couple dozen campaigns against him. Every Democrat with better than 5 percent name recognition is out on the trail speaking to crowds of librarians, yoga instructors, poets, birdwatchers, and organic farmers and talking about climate change, health care, and the need for civility in public life. Next spring, Democrats will nominate a beautiful person in a white robe and sandals who holds out his or her arms and birds come and perch on them.

We assume that this wonderful person will win. That is what should happen, just as we ought to have daffodils blooming in April. As a Minnesotan, I see danger in the act of leaping to logical assumptions.

I awake sometimes in the middle of the night, seeing the headline KING COASTS TO 2ND TERM. Political scientists are astonished — and historians. But bikers, Baptists, and lovers of horror novels are not. The King is a living parable, a bad dream become real. We are not an enlightened people. It is 1856 all over again, except now with social media. Nobody wants to hear this. When I say these things to my fellow Democrats, they excuse themselves and go to the kitchen and brew a pot of chamomile tea with touches of rosemary and warm up a plate of artisanal corn muffins.

They have contempt for the King, his bad grammar, his cruel stare, his love of the garish, his pettiness, his devotion to his hair, and their contempt will lead them to nominate a holy progressive who will have his or her lunch eaten. This is a Minnesotan’s view. I am looking out the window at snowy fields as I write.

Having said that, I am going for a walk. I’ll stick close to the curb, to avoid any falling plinths. Have a good day.

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So much can happen in an ordinary afternoon

I have been struggling this week, looking deep within myself, questioning my own values, asking myself: should I go public with the incident in 2009 when Michelle Obama put her arm around me at a luncheon in Washington? She was posing for photographs with the attendees and I had been the guest speaker and I was told to stand next to her and I did and she put her left arm around my back and pulled me toward her and squeezed. It was a perceptible squeeze. I didn’t say anything at the time but I remember feeling that this was her idea, not mine, that I probably would’ve preferred to shake her hand, but what are you going to say to the First Lady? “Get your arm off me”?

She didn’t place her forehead against mine or kiss the back of my head, nothing like that, but the squeeze was unmistakable and intimated familiarity.

I don’t come from a huggy family. My wife does. I don’t. In my family, a pat on the back is considered sufficient, but when my wife walks into a room full of Keillors, she goes from one to another, throwing her arms out and clutching them to her, and they have to stand there and accept it or else look like soreheads.

People like us — white, Anglo, Midwestern, formal, reluctant to make eye contact, uptight, stiff, boring — are ridiculed, by comedians of color and also colorless comedians, and we have learned not to object. “Where’s your sense of humor?” people would say, so we laugh at the stereotype even though we don’t find it funny.

I don’t go around smiling. It doesn’t mean I’m unhappy; it’s simply the culture I was born in. The photographs of my ancestors that we kept on the piano showed solemn bearded men and severe women and their gloomy children, no incisors visible whatsoever. My dad and uncles didn’t smile a lot. They associated smileyness with salesmen trying to charm you into buying a ten-year-old Dodge with a loose clutch and rust around the bumpers. I went off to college and, in order to be hip, read existential writers about the indifference of the universe to human suffering, while chain-smoking Luckies and drinking espresso, which tends to solemnize a person as well.

On account of my seriousness, people are always asking, “What’s wrong? Is something the matter?” I call this demeanorism, judging people by their facial expression. Inside, I’m pretty lighthearted but on the outside, I look as if I’ve been struck by a baseball bat and am trying to remember my name.

The squeeze that I experienced was ten years ago and I’m not saying it was traumatic but I do wish she would take ownership of it and express some regret at having ignored my feelings, and then I have a sudden sensation in my rear end, a suspicious flatness, and I reach back and there is no wallet there, and suddenly I’m up and running from room to room, checking pockets, looking under tables, calling up cafes I’ve patronized the past couple days.

This is the bright red wallet my wife bought me after I left a black wallet on the seat of a taxicab late one night and it occurs to me that this wallet loss, coming a month after the previous, may be what convinces her I need help. Tomorrow there’ll be a power-of-attorney form to sign and consultation with a series of people in white uniforms who take notes as I’m put through a battery of tests involving matching shapes on little wooden cubes, and my wife, who loves me dearly, will break the news gently. There is a care center that specializes in elderly men with cognitive issues. It’s called Sunnyvale and it has a triple-A rating from the AARP and there is shuffleboard and checkers and color TV in every room and a sing-along on Saturday nights where the elderly gather to sing Grateful Dead and Rolling Stones hits.

For a moment, it occurs to me that maybe Michelle Obama reached around me to lift my wallet out of my back pocket.

And then I find it. It’s in the freezer. I set it down when I was getting out the frozen waffles this morning.

Ignore whatever I was saying before. I am okay. Wallet, cellphone, house keys. This is all a man needs. Wallet, cellphone, house keys. It’s spring. We’re going to be okay.

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The old man manages a Manhattan Lenten meditation

In church on Sunday, we sang a hymn unfamiliar to me in which we asked the Lord to deliver us from “love of pleasure,” which, as I sang it, I realized I have no intention of giving up. None. Okay, it’s Lent but I was raised fundamentalist and it took me a long time to enjoy pleasure, let alone love it. This was on the windy wintry northern plains where, frankly, Lent seems redundant.

This church is in Manhattan where temptations to pleasure line Amsterdam Avenue and I walk to church while smelling fresh croissants, rich dark coffee from Kenya, Japanese noodles, chrysanthemums, soft cheeses, and much more, most of which God is involved in producing. The hymn seemed to suggest that I sacrifice fresh pumpernickel and espresso for Wonder Bread and Sanka.

In the hymn, we also came out against “heedless word and deed” and, because it rhymes, “ambitions to succeed,” which I’m not giving up either. You give up heedlessness and pretty soon you’d never dare eat a peach or wade in a brook or ask a woman to dance. And ambition is what gets me moving in the morning. I’m 76 and writing a musical called “Dusty & Lefty” and already I’m envisioning the review in the Times — “gorgeous … lyrical … makes ‘Hamilton’ seem like a tabletop appliance that blends milkshakes.”

It’s a cruel hymn. It says, “Teach us to know our faults, O God,” which is fine, but then, for the rhyme, it says, “Train us with thy rod.” This is rhyme without reason. Why not “May we with thy truth be shod” or “Let us bloom as goldenrod”? The Psalmist said, “Thy staff and thy rod, they comfort me” but “Train us with thy rod” has definite sadomasochistic overtones in Manhattan.

The pleasures that I love include walking, riding the train, and sitting at a window seat as the airliner comes in low over the Sound and catches the deck of the carrier LaGuardia and hits the brakes. They include what I’m doing right now, tapping away on a laptop, not sure where this is going. They include monogamy, a good idea that puts the parents in the background. We are the stagehands. We have each other and are not searching for self-fulfillment. That’s for the children. I used to seek self-fulfillment in spirituous beverages and stopped fifteen years ago. It’s a pleasure to not do it anymore.

I enjoy the proximity of my wife who as I write is sitting fifteen feet away and, moments ago, when I stood on the sofa to pull the shade so the sun wouldn’t blind me, jumped up from her Sunday crossword and held me by the hips lest I fall. I’ve always wanted her to do that and never knew how to ask. It felt like we were about to dance the tango. The sun poured in like a spotlight at the Roxy and I waited for the drum roll. I hope she will grab me again and next time hold a red gardenia between her teeth and another behind her ear. I like a grabby woman. She womansplained that she was afraid I’d fall and crack my skull. It was very sweet.

Life is good. I can order a cab and then watch its progress on a map on my phone so I don’t need to stand at the curb, I can go into the drugstore and stroll amidst acres of emollients and salves and lubricants. Back in the day we only had Jergens which softened the skin but today’s products hydrate, rejuvenate, regenerate, perhaps emancipate and elucidate, they contain aloe and collagens and vitamin E from Egypt and seaweed oil and fluorides that promote fluency and efflorescence. I could buy socks with odor-eating chemicals. Paste that makes my teeth brilliant.

Instead, I buy a carton of dandelion tea. We used to consider dandelions an enemy and now it’s a comfort. Progress is made. I can text a photograph of us to our daughter at her school and she texts back, “Awwww. Sweet.” Pharmaceuticals that didn’t exist for my uncles enabled me to reach 76, an age when if I jump up on the couch, the woman I love will grab me. I can give up crankiness for Lent and bad grammar — I will not ask her to lay beside me but to LIE beside me — but I won’t give up heedless pleasure. It has been my ambition for many years.

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So that’s over, and what’s next?

Finally it’s coming to an end, two years of speculation, more than what’s been written about the future of American higher education, the American novel, and the planet Earth combined, thanks to that long angular face with the sharp Puritan nose and the stone jaw, a man famous for his silence, and why is the name pronounced MULL-er and not MYOO-ler like all the Muellers I know — what’s going on here? Why the secrecy?

Russian subversion is not high on my list of problems. Winter was. I’m 76 and my wife worries about me slipping on an icy sidewalk and banging my head and losing some crucial memory capacity such as my encyclopedic knowledge of the great girl groups of the Fifties, the Chiffons, the Chenilles, the Chinchillas, Chandeliers, and Chardonnays, or my memory of her name, which begins with a J and rhymes with “antennae.” But now April is at the door and the ice, as George Harrison said, is slowly melting and the Miller Report is finished and Russian confusion is their problem, not ours.

My computer has driven me to the brink several times with senseless icons and pop-ups (“You have been selected to take part in a survey”)  and then the other day the screen went to black for no reason and it was unresponsive and I contemplated Applecide by ball-peen hammer.

I am not an angry man. I have sometimes, when driving, spoken sharply to other drivers about their incredible stupidity, but mostly I’m a pleasant and mannerly passive-aggressive Midwesterner. I am tender and loving to my wife, Penny. I am 76 — did I already say that? — and I believe the cure for anger is euphoria. I don’t drink anymore and I never got high from reefer or cocaine and due to physical cowardice I never skied or dove from planes and so for euphoria I turn to the arts, mainly music.

I was in New York last week and got to hear Renée Fleming sing Richard Strauss at Carnegie Hall and see “Rigoletto” at the Met and attend a Rodgers & Hart revival, “I Married An Angel,” and all three had moments that threw me out of the plane and opened my parachute.

I was transported by Miss Fleming’s golden soprano, a passage in which she decrescendos to a whisper and the audience stops breathing and the hall is filled with a whisper, and the next night by the father-daughter duet of Rigoletto and Gilda and then, Friday night, live on stage, a fabulous tap dance number, twenty hoofers, ten dudes and their sweet patooties, tapping their hearts out, step step step shuffle scuffle slap and slide jump click clunk paradiddle paddle turn pullback and roll.

The audience went to pieces, it was so astonishing. Twenty dancers, in a line of work with 92 percent unemployment, had worked two weeks to create five minutes of anonymous synchronized perfection such as I, at 76, had never seen done onstage before and how can a man not be changed by that? I was.

Three transcendent moments in one week. To me, an old man, this is more meaningful than having a common crook in power. He’s not even the most interesting crook — Nixon was, by far — meanwhile the golden soprano whispers to us, and the Gilda (Nadine Sierra of Fort Lauderdale) and her dad (Roberto Frontali of Rome) sing their hearts out about their love for each other — he sings, “You are my life! Without you, I have nothing” (Mia vita sei! Senza te in terra qual bene avrei?) and we fathers of daughters get choked up, and the twenty hoofers lavish on us the happy rhythms of 1938 when the world was about to fall apart. And then there was Saturday night with Leni, but wild horses couldn’t, etcetera and so forth. Never mind.

Anger is justified when you see an utter fraud in the White House, a dull, dishonest, indifferent man with the manner of a Mafia don, but anger is toxic and in the political arena it so often takes a bad bounce. Spring is here, or almost here, and Mary Oliver’s poetry and Mahler’s Fourth Symphony are probably somewhere in your computer and you will learn things from them that the Special Counsel can’t tell you. “Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves,” said Mary Oliver. A day without euphoria is a wasted day, so find it and love it. A man is tweeting on his phone and primping his hairdo while at the wheel of our national government careening down the highway. Let’s get off at the next exit.

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It’s coming and will find you in due course

I landed in San Francisco last Wednesday just as the rainy season ended and so the city was fresh and green, the Presidio blooming and the meadow in Golden Gate Park where the man with green suspenders walked with his wife who tossed grapes to the squirrels and they came to a quiet spot that seemed to have been waiting for them — that’s from a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti — and if it weren’t for the fact that I have other plans, I could’ve talked my wife into settling down there. It was downright paradisaical. Everywhere I looked, I saw righteous souls who’d spent their lives as Lutheran farmers in North Dakota and now, in the next life, were riding bikes around town and going to yoga and drinking excellent coffee. A young man on a skateboard stopped to talk to me and I thought of asking him if I could take it for a spin.

I’m 76. I never rode a skateboard. I haven’t skated on ice in thirty years. But this is the power of springtime in San Francisco. What in the world did the Grateful Dead need psychedelic drugs for? All you need to do is take a deep breath.

Ferlinghetti turns 100 next week and his City Lights bookstore, once a temple to Kerouac and the Beats, is a major tourist stop. You start out a wild hairy radical and you wind up a scenic attraction. Nobody reads Allen Ginsberg, who saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness, but people still enjoy Ferlinghetti, who had a sense of humor, which helps get you to 100.

I was up on Nob Hill when the bells started jangling at the cathedral so I walked in for Sunday morning Eucharist, the early service in a side chapel, and since there was a blank spot in the evensong bulletin, I wrote a limerick.

Up on a hill in San Fran,

God has brought heaven to man —

Le sacre printemps,

While back where I’m from,

Spring will come soon if it can.

I had had a little experience of resurrection a few days before when I had lunch with the daughter of an old friend of mine, Arvonne, who died last summer at the age of 92, sharp and well-read and making her mark right up to the end. She was the sort of friend who has so much going on that you have to get along on occasional sightings, so we weren’t close but she was important to me, and I miss her. She grew up on a farm in southwestern Minnesota in the dirty Thirties, and she became a powerful encourager and booster, which is a rarity among progressive Democrats, who have more than their share of angry narcissists. I barely know her daughter Jean, but we sat down in a sunny café in the Presidio and dove into conversation and never came up for air. The soul of Arvonne lives on.

I get emotional about these things. Seeing a smart capable confident woman in her prime and knowing how proud her mother would be brought tears to my eyes. So did church. I grew up fundamentalist and married an Episcopalian and discovered a secret love of candles, incense, and berobed clerics. When the celebrant announced that my sins had been forgiven, I felt moved. Whoosh. Gone.

Sunday afternoon I got on board a 757 headed for JFK and wangled myself a window seat so I got to see the whole country for five hours, from the snowy Sierra to the rugged Colorado Rockies, then a couple hours of clouds over the heartland, and then the miles of millions of lights in the dazzling megalopolis. We descended over Far Rockaway and out over the Atlantic, banked and angled back, over the ships anchored offshore, and low over Queens and onto the tarmac.

My ancestor David Powell traversed half that route, from Pennsylvania to Colorado, and saw it more clearly from his wagon seat, the reins in his hands, fording rivers, a farmer hoping to get rich in the silver rush of 1879. He begat eleven children, none of whom inherited his restlessness. I did for a while but am done with it. David would’ve tried out the skateboard. I did not. Didn’t drop acid, chose not to be destroyed by madness. Spring is good enough and no matter where you are, eventually it will find you.

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