Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 7

How a Zsa Zsa changed my day

I wound up my southern tour in Key West, stayed at an 1836 manse on Truman Street, awoke at 4 a.m. for the flight to Atlanta, then to New York. Stood out on the porch and heard a rooster crowing. The plane, a 737, took off at 7 a.m. The pilot locked the brakes tight, revved up the engine to full power, released the brakes, and we rocketed down the runway and got liftoff with about 90 feet of runway to spare. Exciting. I forgot my belt at TSA security in Key West and hiking through the vast Atlanta airport, trying to manage two bags while keeping my pants from falling down, I probably looked helpless because a young woman pushing a wheelchair stopped and asked if I was okay. I said, “Yes, but I lost my belt and my pants are falling down.”

She was delighted. “I’ve seen that type of thing before,” she said. She hung one bag on the back of the chair, I sat in the seat and held the briefcase, and she got me on the “plane train” to the T Concourse and a men’s store and I bought a belt, then back on the train to Concourse B to catch my flight to LaGuardia. This was my first time ever being pushed in an airport wheelchair; walking in airports is my main exercise. The woman’s name was Zsa Zsa and she was a delight, she called out “Hello, sweetheart” to other wheelchair pushers, she sang out “Chair coming through!” to clear a path onto and off of trains, she called me “Darling,” she said “How’s your day going?” to anyone who looked downcast and suddenly their day improved. She was joy on wheels, and it was illuminating to see how a joyful demeanor and radical courtesy can be a weapon to triumph over the passive aggressions and bad attitudes in public places — you simply couldn’t help but love the woman. She left you no other choice.

I said, “Your mama named you Zsa Zsa because she wanted you to be somebody special and believe me, you exceeded all expectations.” She laughed and set my bags down, wished me a good day and meant it. She didn’t hold out her hand. I’d never taken a wheelchair before and had no idea what to give her so I handed her five twenties and said, “You made my day” and we parted ways.

I come from dour northerners, wary of strangers, defensive, formal, but my pusher lady gave me a lift that lasted for days and sticks with me still even as the tycoons appear to have our government firmly in their grip — did Harry Truman ever sit silently in the Oval Office while J. Paul Getty conducted a press conference five feet away? No, he did not. Tycoons travel by private jet with security men and are met by limos and never encounter a genuinely joyful person like Zsa Zsa, which may explain some of their cruelty.

I came home and got some clue as to Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg & Company, all cursed by insatiable greed: they can never have enough. I spent an hour online trying to cancel an old credit card on which I was still getting charges though I haven’t used it for years. The website was an elaborate maze that made it impossible to cancel. I called the 800 number and got involved with a robotic voice that read directions very rapidly as if it were talking to another computer and not to a human being. Eventually by pressing zero over and over I got shunted off to a human woman. She seemed human though she was trying to sound mechanical. She kept saying that I must call the providers to cancel recurring charges.

I explained that I don’t have their phone numbers. She repeated the directions. I repeated my explanation. Again, directions. Explanation. Mild dementia ensued. I wasted an hour, accomplished nothing, and so will go on paying money to providers who don’t provide anything that I am aware of though my awareness is dulled by the hour of insanity.

This is the world we find ourselves in and in this world Zsa Zsa shines like a beacon. Be joyful, folks. We have a satirist president with a joke Cabinet and a majority party with its pants around its ankles. We’d rather see them than be them. Keep the faith.

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An account of what I’ve been up to

I’ve just finished a ten-day solo tour down South as the World’s Oldest Stand-Up and it was a major adventure for an old guy with memory issues who keeps forgetting the word “cognitive” and other words of a similar sort, walking onstage every night to do ninety minutes or more freestyle in front of a big crowd, most of whom probably voted the wrong way last November, and make them laugh a lot.

A person forgets things at 82. One night I forgot the story about the Butt Grip Contest in Lake Wobegon and it’s not easy to find your way back to a logical point where you can have old Norwegian men drop their trousers and attempt to pick up a 50-cent piece with their bare cheeks. I got this story from Alan Simpson, a Republican senator from Wyoming who was a fan of the show, and it works beautifully and I hate to lose it.

The show is a service to the crowd; it’s not for me to show off. I give them a singing intermission, they stand and sing “America” and “I Saw Her Standing There,” which gives older men the pleasure of singing falsetto OOOOHs and then “O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder consider all the worlds Thy Hands have made,” which brings tears to their eyes. Oftentimes Unitarians have told me afterward how much they enjoyed singing that old Baptist hymn. (When else would they ever get the chance?)

I never mentioned Elon Musk or his friend. I talked about Minnesota winter and the beauty of being 82 and my mother and the adventure of putting on my underwear in the morning without leaning against the wall and all in the interest of lightheartedness.

God tells us to do good but still He

Tells us to lighten our hearts

And lightening includes being silly

And even vulgar, which is good for old farts.

Wound up in Key West for the last show and also stopped by the Ernest Hemingway House and Museum. My mother was upset when she saw me reading A Farewell To Arms when I was 18, afraid it would lead me down the wrong path, which it certainly didn’t. I was never fascinated by death and killing and I never ventured into the long dark hallways of depression. I admired his graceful style and imitated it briefly.

The shows being down South, people enjoyed hearing me talk about Minnesota winter back in my boyhood, waking up on a twenty-below morning, a blizzard in progress, but no mention of school cancellations — back then school cancellation was on the Forbidden list along with atheism, communism, and boys dancing ballet — so I put on my long woolens, ate my Cream of Wheat, and held Mickey our cat who was miserable in winter. His sphincter locked up in the cold and he needed to be massaged to loosen the bladder. That was my job, gently manipulating the genitalia of an elderly cat who could not be shot because it would break the hearts of the little kids and they’d grow up to become criminals.

And then the venture out through the wintry blast to the county road, barely visible in the blowing snow, to wait for the bus, sitting huddled in the ditch, listening for coyotes, watchful for snow snakes slithering under the snow, making slight waves.

My crowd, in their shorts and sandals, enjoyed this, probably thinking it was fictional, the drowsiness of the boy in the ditch, watching for headlights, seeing the dark shapes of buzzards in the bare limbs of trees, big carnivorous birds watching me, waiting, and if for some reason the bus does not appear — this was before children had cellphones, we were beyond rescue — could I defend myself against the sharp beaks of a flock of hungry birds?

It was a good show, with jokes and poetry and a sexual awakening and pond hockey and the grimness of Ecclesiastes and the goodness of aunts and girl cousins, plus the singing and the buzzards, and I felt it was a genuine public service. No mention of Musk or Vance, no mention of constitutional issues, carbon emissions, climate change. Call me a coward but I saw my job as giving them an evening of freedom. When you can get Unitarians to sing joyfully about the Second Coming, you’ve accomplished some good in the world. I wish my mother had been there.

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Draw her near, Shakespeare

I never cared for Valentine’s Day as a kid, when we had to address a valentine to everyone in the classroom, Miss Moehlenbrock’s rule, so that every child would feel equally important — she was a true liberal, but the idea of universal fondness didn’t ring true for me, and clearly some valentines were more equal than others. Some valentines have integrity and the others are torn on dotted lines from a sheet of eight. I got a lot of those.

I was fond of Corinne and Christine because they were big readers and had been to New York City, which I had not. But the Valentine message –— “I love you, please be mine” –— wasn’t the right one. Possession wasn’t my aim.

Solomon was a romantic guy and he wrote, “Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the fields; let us go out early to the vineyards, and see whether the vines have budded, whether the grape blossoms have opened and the pomegranates are in bloom.” The guy just wanted to check his garden, but the woman took it as a proposal so Sol wound up with a thousand wives. A thousand wedding pictures, a thousand women saying, “Why are you so silent this morning? What did I do? Are you involved with another woman?” (Yes, 999 of them.) He had a thousand kitchens because what woman would share a kitchen with another woman and have to keep rearranging the cupboards? His book in the Bible, the Song of Solomon, was his way of sending an SOS.

I know about this because I’ve been married more often than you have. I fell in love with women because I saw myself as a rescuer — I rode in on a white horse and found a beautiful woman beset by loneliness and having trouble with her a.c. and I dismounted and fixed the problem and she threw herself in my arms. I rescued her from her small mean town and took her to my castle on the hill and naturally expected her to be delighted and for a few weeks she was and then one morning she said, “You were snoring loudly last night and I hate to mention it but you keep missing the toilet when you pee. And you go around humming the same Grateful Dead song and I wish you’d change the tune. Please.”

I rescued her from despair and made her my Queen and now she’s my editor. I galloped into her life and helped her up in the saddle behind me, her arms around me, whispering endearments in my ear as we rode through the Garden of Eden and then she says, “I think you were supposed to turn left back there” and she googles it and Siri says, “Yes, you should have turned left.”

Time passed. The horse died. I sold the castle. I use the sword now to chop greens for the salad. The escutcheon is a serving tray. Everything has changed. A tribe of digital geniuses has invaded, heroic nerds who swoop down on beautiful women in the library who are agonizing over a term paper they accidentally deleted and now, all hope lost, their career in veterinary aromatherapy dangling in the balance, young Derek recovers the file from iCloud and also shows her how to reformat complex interdependent functions into coded extended templates and she throws herself into his arms and okay, maybe his intelligence is artificial and his kisses formulaic, but she is moved by his problem-solving and maybe she marries him. I’m sure it happens all the time.

On Valentine’s Day, however, we poets have an edge. Derek thinks of the heart as a matrix and love as input with no downside, a win-win situation, which does not touch her heart, but the poet steps forward and spreads the embroidered cloths of heaven under her feet, cloths enwrought with golden and silver light, the blue and the dim and the dark cloths of night and light and the half-light, and even though he works at Burger King and lives in his parents’ basement, she cannot resist him. Language is the heart of love.

You may snore and pee on the floor but if you can write a good poem for her, you’ll be okay, pal. Write her a poem. Don’t text it. Write it on paper with a pen and she will come live with you and be your love midst valleys, woods, and fields and you will all the pleasures prove that this brief summer yields.

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The Palestrump Resort and 1800-Hole Golf Course

I sympathized with our President’s proposing that we run all the Palestinians out of Gaza and take ownership and turn it into a luxury resort. I’ve had crazy ideas myself but thank goodness I’ve kept them to myself. I do think a neurologist should be brought in — this sounds like global amnesia to me. Golf can be a dangerous game and you wonder if he might’ve taken a hit. The press doesn’t cover his rounds closely.

So of course everyone in the world denounced the idea, and poor Karoline Leavitt had to stand up in the White House press room and say he hadn’t meant what he said. And then, walking through a crowd of reporters shouting questions at him, the man himself did not stop to respond.

The look on his face struck me as one of confusion. He is 78, after all, and it is a stressful job, even if you do have Elon Musk, the World’s Richest Man, running the shop. At this age (I am 82) it’s not easy to maintain the air of belligerence and manly vengeance that the MAGA folks expect of him. After an hour or two of the jutting jaw and the narrowed eyes, a man feels like telling a joke.

DJT’s last joke was in 2019 when he threatened to sue Wharton School, Fordham, Penn, and his high school if any of them made his academic record public. The joke was on him. The truth is that the electorate is suspicious of someone with top grades. George W. Bush knew that and acted like a bozo although his grades at Yale were better than John Kerry’s. Kerry spoke like a graduate student and Bush talked like a guy you’d go fishing with. He won.

Kamala Harris had the disadvantage of being the child of immigrants who pushed her to excel and to speak intelligently, as immigrant parents tend to do. DJT was born rich to parents who believed he was brilliant and perfect from the day he was set in the bassinet. Thanks to his charmed childhood, he has never, to the best of my knowledge, admitted a mistake or apologized for anything. This sets him apart from the hardworking lunch-bucket backache crowd that elected him. You and I live with a raft of regrets and he knows not one. This gives the man a golden glow.

In fact, the day after Karoline tried to walk him back from the U.S. occupation of Gaza, Don put his foot down, by God, reasserting his preposterous proposal and I assume that DOGE 20-year-olds are working on a plan for clearing the debris and putting in the hotels and the spa and Palace Tinian, giant crypts for cryptocurrency, and the World’s Largest Golf Course, with 3,600 sand traps created by the Israeli air force.

The man is in his own world, promising to end the war in Ukraine on Day One, and Day One comes and then Week Two and nothing need be said. Or he could say it was only a bargaining position. Or that he was promising to go to Fort Wayne on May One, and the American people, tumbling around in the backwash of texts and posts, bulletins, streaming idiocy, hardly notice. It’s just one more blip in the data blizzard.

This did not happen back when we looked each other in the eye and talked and were able to distinguish critical thinking from chicken manure. Dwight D. Eisenhower, my parents’ favorite president, did not bring in Henry Ford to help him efficiencize the federal government nor did he promise to end the war in Korea on Day One and then claim he meant he’d cure diarrhea in Ceylon. Odd as it is for an old draft dodger to place his faith in the military to save America, that’s exactly what I do. America means more to people who’ve put their lives at risk for it, just as Christmas means more if you’ve experienced poverty. I sense a dedication to duty and a strength of character in our uniformed men and women that is missing from Congress.

We’ve seen some notable men and woman sell their souls in broad daylight recently. God have mercy on them. There are simple tests for dementia, Melania. Time to step up and do what a wife should do.

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Mother, the queen of my heart

Long ago, when I bought a Manhattan apartment, my mother, Grace, gave me a clay coffee cup with “Minnesota” painted on it and our state bird, the loon, so I’d remember where I come from, though at age 44, it was pretty well embedded in me. In college, announcing on a classical music radio station, I managed to refit my Minnesota accent to sound educated, but I still have a keen sense of insignificance, which comes with the territory. Scott Fitzgerald and Bob Dylan are our big claims to success and Scott died young and alcoholic and Bob is famous for obscurity and Walter Mondale was the politest candidate for president in American history and the biggest loser and Bronko Nagurski was actually Canadian.

She was a good mother. She told stories about me, how when Dad went off to join the Army in World War Two, I wouldn’t let anyone sit in his chair at the head of the table. “Daddy’s chair!” I said and could be quite forceful about it. She worried about me, how I enjoyed lighting fires and how I loved to play on the Mississippi shore though I’d been told not to. She worried about drowning and about tornadoes and in the summer if a storm came up we always went to the southwest corner of the basement as authorities said to do. All except me. I liked to stand in the yard and watch the storm arrive and the branches of trees shake, hoping for the sight of the funnel cloud.

When I was sad or disappointed or felt cheated of life’s pleasures, she always said to me, “What’s the matter? Did the dog pee on your cinnamon toast?” which always made me grin, the thought of our aged cocker spaniel climbing up on the table and lifting his left hind leg. It makes me smile to write it now. It was her own unique line, no other mother said it. She knew how much I loved toast with butter, sugar, and cinnamon on it. It was her line for me.

I was not a good son. A good son is one who visits his mother regularly and I was too busy to do that. I ran around a lot. Sometimes I traveled in fancy company. I was once in a movie directed by Robert Altman and financed, in part, by the Pohlad family. Carl Pohlad, the richest man in Minnesota, sat next to my mother at the premiere, and the two of them carried on an extensive conversation, which didn’t faze her a bit. I was proud of her. My mother was one of thirteen children of William and Miriam on Longfellow Avenue South in Minneapolis and sometimes during the Depression she went door-to-door peddling peanut butter sandwiches she’d made. When Mr. Pohlad said, “You must be very proud of your son,” she replied, “I am very proud of all my children,” which is the correct answer.

I have two nephews who are very good to their mother and I stand in awe of them and think, “There goes the man I meant to be.” They are polite to their father but they dote on their mother. She lives in Minnesota and one boy lives in France and the other in Vietnam but they have (1) married excellent women who recognize the royalty of the grandma, (2) produced delightful grandchildren, (3) gotten excellent jobs in law and engineering so they can afford to fly the grandma to visit the grandchildren and vice versa. I am the recipient of videos of visitation scenes and it is clear that the delight of the grandma is a factor in the production of fabulous grandkids.

I remember my grandmas as austere figures in dowager outfits whom a child was to revere and maintain silence and not be childish and not expect physical contact due to their fragility. I was to present a picture of perfect rectitude even if it wrecked me, which it sort of did. My sister-in-law’s grandkids whoop and chortle and climb all over her and it’s clear they’ll grow up to save the world and not become an old sourpuss like me.

People look at me and say, “What’s wrong?” It’s the stone face, the lowered brow, the grim affect. It was the effect of eating toast with dog urine on it. But when I take my Minnesota cup down and fill it with coffee, I think of my mother and I smile. Her 110th birthday is coming up and I should do something special in her honor, such as write something about her that makes you feel good.

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Living in the present, a day at a time

Most aphorisms are self-evident, such as “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” and the one about glass houses and throwing stones and the mice playing when the cat is away and “As you sow, so shall you harvest” and as I get older, the ones about living in the moment and seizing the day and not crying over spilt milk feel very profound.

I remember a day fifty years ago when I had lunch with my hero S.J. Perelman in Minneapolis when he was to give a reading and I was to introduce him. I was stunned by admiration for his writing, such as: I guess I’m just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation’s laws.

I admired elegant wackiness, having grown up among devout Christians who even in dinner table conversation tried to sound like the King James translation. They wouldn’t have written a paragraph like his about the mad scientist if you’d gotten them drunk, sat them on a bundle of dynamite and set the timer to ten minutes. I knew Perelman’s work from The New Yorker and also from the Marx Brothers movies (great lines like “Don’t wake him up. He’s got insomnia. He’s trying to sleep it off.”). He didn’t know me from Adam or an atom-smasher. I looked at him and tried to compose a suitable compliment but nothing was good enough and then a man told him that I had been published in The New  Yorker and Perelman leaned across the table and started complaining about the magazine, its miserly payments, its confounded editing, and its clueless fact-checkers who ripped into comic fiction as if it were a doctoral thesis, and it was the ultimate honor, to be treated as a fellow working writer by the great Perelman. I was prepared to kiss his ring and he talked to me as a colleague in his line of work. The honor of equality.

His illustrious past didn’t matter, the future was unknown, but there we were, two writers having a Cobb salad and a chicken sandwich, about to go meet an audience, living in the present.

I guess I’m just an old humorist at heart. Give me a wedding chapel, a groom who forgot his suspenders and is trying to hold his pants up, a beautiful girl with last-minute trepidations, the man puts the ring on her finger as his pants drop, there is an expulsion of gas, and I care not who wins the National Book Award.

I live in the present. If I were to think about the future, I’d be alarmed about the utter demise of journalism and the self-degradation that many U.S. senators are eager to accept and the use of cryptocurrency to enrich the Chief Executive by tech tycoons kicking back 20% of their federal contracts, but instead I spend the day in my laboratory experimenting to design AI software to let me chat with long-deceased relatives such as my great-great-grandfather William Evans Keillor who says, “I don’t know if this is heaven — it looks like Nebraska — and immortality is not my cup of tea but I’m getting used to it. No calendars, no clocks. The good news is that death dissolves your marriage so I’m free of Sarah and I’ve taken up with an angelic slip of a girl named Celeste who flutters about in water-wings and silk undies and instead of beans and bacon we have rigatoni with zucchini, cannellini, salami Bolognese, prosciutto, radicchio, parmigiano, pepperoni primavera, chorizo crostata, guacamole, guanciale Calabrese, pistachio pesto, and Sangiovese. We never had Italian food in Minnesota in 1880.”

He’s quite the guy. Opinionated but very witty. I told him to look up Perelman and now the two of them play canasta together. I’m living in the present, which, thanks to AI, includes the past.

I guess I’m just Elon Musk at heart. Give me an office in the White House, let the old guy revise the Constitution with the wave of a Sharpie all he likes, I will give the Nazi salute when and where I please, and when the Earth burns up, I’ll be sitting on Mars eating a Milky Way, and I care not that I’m the only human being in the universe.

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Greenland, Panama, Canada: my views

I just spent a few days in Texas and had a great time — me, an old Diversity-Elitist-Iniquity Democrat, enjoying the state that gave us Ted Cruz. But it’s true. It was very congenial. I am on a new career as America’s Oldest Still-Standing Comedian and I didn’t talk politics and neither did the people I talked to. It’s easy not to, especially for us on the losing side. I’m a northerner and I believe in government because it plows the roads when it snows, and up north we don’t cancel school just because snow is forecast, which they do in Florida. This is one reason more mathematicians come from the Upper Mississippi than from Tallahassee. I also feel that when all the undocumented migrants are deported, our young college grads who majored in English aren’t going to like working in slaughterhouses or cleaning hotel rooms and we’ll find bone chips in the chicken and we’ll sleep in beds other people slept in and we’ll just have to get used to it.

I met a good many Baptists in Lubbock and Arlington and the lovely city of New Braunfels and didn’t talk politics except that I got the audience to sing “America” about freedom ringing from every mountainside. I didn’t see signs of decline in Texas nor people rejoicing at the beginning of a new golden age, but maybe I was looking in the wrong places.

I didn’t bring up the subject of Canada being the 51st state because frankly I don’t think it is. For one thing, their French is better than ours and also there is no South up North and without the South, without New Orleans jazz and Delta blues and bluegrass and Black gospel quartets and corrupt governors, men passing a bottle of bourbon around, strip-mall evangelists hollering about hellfire and the Antichrist, there is no America as we know it.

Canadian culture is of very limited range. It is missing the apocalyptic. Canada has never elected a prime minister who talked about Canadian carnage and illegal migrant Americans invading the country and who claimed to be the greatest leader in Canadian history, whom God had chosen to bring about a new golden age. That’s not them, that’s us.

The Trumps think of Canada as an extension of the USA because, being real estate tycoons, they don’t know about geography, except for Queens, Long Island, and Manhattan. And they have little experience with snow, DJT having had a limo driver since age five. He never had to stand in a blizzard by a highway waiting for the bus. The reason you never see a photo of little Donald in a classroom with other children is that one doesn’t exist: he had tutors. That is why he capitalizes so many words that don’t need capitalization. So when he talks about annexing Canada and taking Greenland and going to war for the Panama Canal, he is slightly off the mark and someone needs to point this out.

You take over Greenland, you’re going to be dealing with the Greenlandic language which comes in three discrete dialects, Kalaallisut, Tunumiit, and Inuktun, each with a few thousand speakers who are devoted to their tongue. You get involved with those people, you’ll be walking around with a Greenlandic app on your iPhone and even so you’ll be misunderstood. We’d be wise to skip this.

A war in the Gulf of America to liberate the Canal would threaten the cruise industry and also shut down the Canal itself, which would immediately raise prices on consumer goods from China.

But the real threat is a Canadian invasion.

Our northern border is the least defended border in the world — some places in North Dakota and Minnesota, only a single strand of barbed wire marks it. Coyotes cross it daily, deer, bears. Canadian Mounties on snowmobiles could come sweeping across and get to Iowa before anybody would realize it and their advantage over American troops is obvious. A disproportionate number of American enlisted men and women are from southern states and have never gone into combat in cold weather. Iraq and Vietnam were hard enough, but a war in Wisconsin in February would be big big trouble.

I like the idea of knocking down windmills and drilling for oil in Yellowstone and Kash Patel will be the Greatest FBI Director in American History (move over, J. Edgar Hoover), but I’d leave Canada to itself.

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A wonderful night in Lubbock

I got to spend last week in California, seeing people, doing things, from Irvine up to Sacramento, and people kept trying to get me to go with them to vineyards, though I no longer imbibe. I used to and then about 25 years ago I stopped. I am capable of idiocy on my own without adding intoxication to it. And I had a two-year-old daughter and I didn’t want her to see me drunk. She and I love silliness, which is a whole other matter.

I went to Modesto, home of Ernest and Julio Gallo wine, the wine I drank in my college days, the cheap wine in the gallon glass jug. You poured it into an ordinary drinking glass and drank it with dinner and either you liked it or you didn’t drink it but you didn’t sit and discuss it. Now I have friends, bless their hearts, who are connoisseurs of wine and who employ terms like “well-structured,” “buttery,” “complex,” “nicely restrained,” “autumnal,” “jam-flavored,” and “rangy,” which strikes me as complex well-structured hogwash. I am an alien in their midst. The only wine I taste now is from the Sunday morning communion cup, and I suppose it’s complex but I simply think of it as the blood of salvation.

Well, we live in a big democratic country where people speak freely so you don’t have to go far to be an alien. I’m an alien among Gen Zers when they talk digitalese. I tune in sports talk shows on TV to enjoy watching grown men shouting at each other about a game, meanwhile the planet is heating, Los Angeles is burning, and a party has taken power whose members are forbidden to speak the words “climate change.”

From Modesto I went to Lubbock, Texas, by way of Southwest Airlines, which encourages its flight attendants to do stand-up. Landed in Lubbock, and one of them said, “Be careful opening the overheads. Luggage can shift. Shift happens.”

I went to Lubbock to do a stand-up show myself at the Cactus Theater, and standing in the lobby it seemed to me that I was drawing a Baptist crowd. I asked an usher and she agreed with me. So I worked some hymns into the show, not hard for an old evangelical like me, and when I started into “It Is Well With My Soul” and they joined in full-voice, suddenly I wasn’t an alien anymore. I was among brethren and sistren. I was instantly at home. And then “How Great Thou Art.” It was powerful. Lubbock is Buddy Holly’s hometown and they also knew “Every day, it’s a-gettin’ closer, going faster than a roller coaster” and they knew “You know my love’ll not fade away.” And it won’t. I love Lubbock and I always will and I don’t care whom they voted for in November, those people are family. Their singing was not autumnal or rangy; it was heartfelt and harmonious.

Life is good, even when we’re alienated. We Democrats got skunked and so for the next four years, we’re free to savor life itself. The victor has proudly proclaimed his contempt for our traditions and institutions, which are alien to him. His faith is in himself. Good luck with that.

I intend to enjoy defeat and go back and read Shakespeare, whom I wrote C-minus term papers about in college using terms like “well-structured,” “complex,” “buttery.” I’m going to travel to Dublin, Stockholm, Rome, where a person can become absorbed in the immediate surroundings, be engrossed in the moment. I want to hear The Marriage of Figaro again and the Fauré Requiem. I want to walk in the park with my sweetie and look at people and their dogs and the jazz musicians who congregate to jam. I want to pay attention to joyful outbursts of little kids astonished by ordinary things.

The country changes. Someday I will open the Lifestyle section of the newspaper and find reviews of macaroni and cheese (“impressive density” “refined finish,” “suave but structural”) and why not tap water (“earthy accents and savory character”). To which I say: What-EVer. I love the old hymns, face-to-face friendliness, good manners, the limerick, a walk in the park. Someday I hope to shake hands with the bishop who dared ask the Chief to show mercy in her prayer at the Cathedral on Monday.

I knew it could happen someway:

A bull rules the whole USA.

But life is riskable

And I’ll stay Episcopal

And live happily day to day.

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Fifty candles on the cake, must be a mistake

When you celebrate the 50th anniversary of something in your own life, it tells you that you’re older than you thought and that career change is no longer an option, much as you wish you’d gone into software design so you wouldn’t have to ask children how to reformat a page on your laptop, but okay, longevity is what we were going for, right? It’s why I stopped smoking. I was a chain-smoker because I thought that’s what writers do and then I saw them dying off in their forties and fifties. I wrote mostly about existential grief, but when I married and had a kid, I had to get a job and I got one in radio because it was the 6 a.m. shift and there were no other applicants.

It took me about five minutes to figure out that listeners didn’t need to hear about grief at 6 a.m., they had their own, so I got into comedy. I grew up evangelical, which is a solemn thing so I seldom smile and therefore TV was not an option but I wanted to be useful so I did radio and fifty years later, strangers come up and say, “I listened to you during a hard time in my life so thank you,” and to me, this is endlessly amazing. And that’s the story of my life.

I’m 82 and I still work full time because if I didn’t I’d suffer anxiety about Washington and what’s the point of that? He’s our first convicted-felon president and nobody knows who might deter him from making it a lifetime appointment so why should I waste my declining years in anxiety? I’m in the DEI woke left wing and that’s trouble enough; I need more silliness in my life, not anguish — I did anguish in my twenties. Enough. Now I write:

There was an old man from the prairie

Determined to laugh and be merry,

And write light verse

And never curse

Not even when necessary.

I worked like a crazy person back in my middle years to make up for an intelligence deficit, doing a radio show, trying to be an author, and I had to give up watching TV for about forty years, though I loved TV, and so I have no idea who the celebrities are anymore and I’m still stuck in the old culture when we kids of blue-collar parents aspired to attend symphony concerts as a sign of social mobility and now those days are gone forever. Now you can imagine Hulk Hogan becoming Secretary of Education — confirmed narrowly, but confirmed — and deciding to deny federal money to any school system requiring attendance beyond the fifth grade. Not saying that’s a bad idea, just noting the change in the country. And war with Denmark has not been ruled out, at last word.

But it’s none of my business. And I’m not saying that taxes aren’t exorbitant in the upper brackets and need to be brought down to one or one-and-a-quarter percent or that Medicare and Social Security aren’t a waste of public funds — let the kids take care of the old people, everybody has a spare bedroom or a sofa bed, no reason for the enterprising to look after the laggards. If you want universal health care, apply for Danish citizenship and learn to pronounce the ø and enjoy herring on toast (ristet brød) or become a Brit and learn to misspell “labor” and “neighbor.”

Ignorance has been a fine strategy for me. I speak English and once knew the difference between “that” and “which” and tried to explain it to others but that is a hopeless cause, which I’ve now abandoned. Nuts to which. Nuts to science. The country has voted against it and in favor of setting up oil wells in national parks until the fuel runs out and the sky is dense with smog and we have July all year round and cities are burning and New York is a few skyscrapers sticking up out of the Atlantic. I favor diversity but only in Kansas City. For me, it’s reclusivity.

I sit at my desk and write about cognitive dissonance. A psychoanalyst pal told me realize that all the bric-a-brac of Freudian analysis means little, that you simply listen sympathetically and offer common sense advice such as “Don’t give up.” (I think she called it “creative dissonance.”) Maybe voting for a felon is also cognitively dissonant, but I’m not there yet and wouldn’t know about that.

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One more day, one more airport

For the first time in living memory, I was the only passenger in a TSA security line at a major airport — Tucson, noon on a Friday, a time you’d expect Arizonans to be heading for Nome or Juneau for a weekend of darkness, but no. I wended back and forth in the maze of barriers and the guy at the conveyor seemed happy to see me. I zipped on through and counted 15 uniformed men and women defending the country against one octogenarian liberal who’s never owned a gun, hasn’t fired an explosive in fifty years and then only a few bottle rockets, and arrived at my gate two hours early, and celebrated by buying a latte at a coffee stand that offers tables and chairs.

This is a great boon to authors, having a table in an airport to set the laptop on, and few airports offer them for free, not realizing that most Americans over forty are authors or thinking about becoming one. You have to buy a latte or else pay exorbitant fees to join a club and sit among software executives. I leave a $5 tip for the employees who clean the tables. And when people open up a conversation and ask about my line of work, I don’t say I’m an author because they’ll say, “I’ve been thinking about writing a book myself.”

First, they ask, “Where you from?” and I’ve learned not to say, “New York City” because it obliges them to talk about horrible criminal acts committed in broad daylight by homeless illegal migrants from Nicaragua, so I say, “Lincoln, Nebraska,” and that’s the end of it. Once someone mentioned their admiration of Abraham Lincoln, but mostly they say, “What’s it like there?” and I say, “Fabulous. I’d never live anywhere else.” And then they ask what I do for a living.

I’m an author of fiction so there are various ways I can go with this. Sometimes I’m an Anglican priest but I can also be an English lit professor or a proctologist and usually I’m safe from further questioning. If they happen to be Episcopalian, then I’m a member of a secret priestly order that lives in a monastery in Montana. If they happen to be an English teacher, I talk about J.F. Powers. I used to know Jim Powers and I admire his work, Morte D’Urban and Prince of Darkness, but I invent a whole series of baseball novels he wrote about Babe Ruth touring with an exhibition team, the Sorbitol All-Stars during the winter, traveling around South America. I’ve never set foot in South America so it’s fun. I have never run into a South American, thank God.

Nobody ever shows the slightest interest in proctology. They just avoid shaking hands.

Other people who travel for a living complain about it but I love it especially now that I’ve become unknown. I used to be a semi-celeb back in the Eighties but my audience has mostly drifted into dementia and they travel only with caregivers and under sedation, so it’s a whole new opportunity for me.

The people I meet have no idea I’m a Marxist-Communist so they’re curious which side of the political eclipse I fall on, neo-fascist or Deep State, and I like to play with them. They ask, “So what did you think of the election?” and maybe I say, “I was in China the whole time and I’d like to talk about it but I can’t because I’m wearing a heart monitor that a State Department computer has control of and there’s a list of 47 words that if I utter any one of them, my heart stops and I fall unconscious into your arms.” Or I can say, “I have a rare mental deficit that left me illiterate and so I only watch Fox News. It’s all I know.”

But in the Tucson airport, nobody said hello so I had to be simply who I am, no relief, just one more aging has-been who once played the Hollywood Bowl, Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, and now I’m playing senior centers and rehab facilities, singing some, telling old jokes, but also doing blood pressure and neck massages and upping people’s liquid intake. You do what you can for people. Once dementia has set in, there’s not much demand for fiction: life itself becomes fiction.

Which makes me wonder about what I’ve been telling you. Which is true, which is false. I leave it to you, I gotta plane to catch. See you later, alligator.

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