Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 71

One more beautiful wasted day

Last Wednesday I was walking briskly toward Penn Station in New York and I tripped and took a nosedive, made a three-point landing, rolled onto my side, and within three seconds, three passersby stopped and asked, “Are you okay?” I said, “Just embarrassed,” and when I started to get up and fell again, a fourth joined them. An old lady my age, a young black guy, a construction worker in an orange helmet, and a teenage girl. I limped east on 34th Street, and turned, and the guy in the helmet was watching me. I waved. He waved back.

That’s my story: there’s a lot of goodness out there. On the subway heading down to 34th, people were packed in tight, avoiding eye contact, and a young woman who maybe is a ballet dancer stood six inches south of me in a sleeveless backless black dress and I was afraid the train would lurch and I’d be charged with assault, but out on the street, people notice a tall man when he trips and falls and they rush to his side. And when he gets up, momentarily confused, and asks, “Which way is Penn Station?” they tell him. Thirty-third and Seventh Avenue. Right over there.

It’s good for a tall man to fall. You can wave mortality away for decades, but when you trip and fall, it’s not a metaphor coming up at you, it’s concrete. Welcome to gravity. You ride the escalator down to the station platform, holding onto the handrail. You are careful stepping over the gap and onto the train.

I rode up to Providence where my ancestor John Crandall spent some time back in the 17th century. He was a devout Puritan when he left England, but when he landed in Boston and got a good look at John Winthrop, he thought again. Their intolerance and cruelty were breathtaking — the public whippings, stonings, tongue piercing with a hot iron, ear cropping, branding, the drowning of a young woman for witchcraft whose accusers said they had seen her in dreams doing witchy things.

That was a true witch-hunt, not like the special counsel’s investigation of Russian participation in the 2016 election, and it offended my ancestor so that he removed to Rhode Island and joined the Anabaptists of Roger Williams, who labored to live in peace with those unlike themselves, even Quakers and Catholics.

My intention was to check up on family history, but instead I ran into someone I know from Chicago, a guy who is rich with children and is raising a nine-year-old granddaughter whom he’s adopted, and we sat around having coffee and talking about our mutual friend, the late Studs Terkel, and the musical, “Working,” based on Studs’s book, which is popular all over the world and in American high schools, and then we talked about Charles Dickens, whose “A Christmas Carol,” in dramatic form, is now supporting hundreds of smaller regional theaters across the country, earning the dough that allows them to stage bleak postmodern dramas.

So I thought about writing a bleak postmodern “A Christmas Carol” in which Scrooge has a big blond ducktail and instead of “Bah humbug!” he says, “Fake news!” and he says that he, Donald J. Scrooge, is the most generous man in the history of London and everybody knows it and that he knows more about Christmas than anybody and that bleeding-heart liberals are to blame for the street urchins. The Spirit of Christmas Past brings out a bevy of bathing beauties and Christmas Future shows him the weeping Cratchits after Tiny Tim’s demise and Scrooge says, “He was a loser. He wasn’t just tiny, he was miniscule. A nobody. Good riddance.”

And then it was time to head back to New York on the train. A man goes in search of historical truth and winds up with another beautiful wasted day. I squeezed into a fourplex seat with a table between, two big guys hard at work on laptops, a sleeping woman, and me. Tight quarters, four people trying hard to avoid body contact. The guy beside me had papers spread out, notes from a meeting, and was organizing them into rational goulash, and I didn’t envy him. He worked three hours straight, grim-faced, until we rolled into New York. The train jerked to a stop and the woman awoke and kicked me. A gentle kick, but she apologized and asked if I was okay. “Very much so,” I said. “Thank you.” Which is the truth.

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It is a good and pleasant thing not to rant

It’s the details of a story that give it life, not the high moral outlook of the thing, but many people find details confusing: it’s righteousness they crave, righteousness as a rationale for anger, and so you have the current surge in harangues and fulminations and the rarity of true storytelling. It’s just human nature. But it’s sad to see.

I was at a family gathering Friday night at which there was no fulminating, no laments, which is rare for us Democrats. Justice Kavanaugh was barely mentioned, nor the name that rhymes with “lump.” We were there in honor of love, to meet a nephew who has moved faraway — common, for bright young ambitious people — and his French girlfriend, Kate. Matthew is a smart studious engineer, working out on a frontier that an old English major like me cannot comprehend, and it was lovely seeing him with his arm around this woman and hers around him. She is French, from Normandy, an engineer too.

There were thirty of us, retirees, small children, those in between, and surely it was the presence of small children that helped save us from ripping into the forces of evil and ignorance, and also the presence of Kate who clearly makes Matthew happy in a way that algorithms cannot. And then there was Fiona, a 17-year-old Chinese exchange student spending the year with my niece and her adoptive Chinese daughter. Fiona has a beautiful radiant smile that sees her through the twisty pitfalls of English. It’s a pleasure to talk to that radiance. Apple pie with ice cream was a novelty to her, and she was curious about Christmas, which she’s never experienced, and so we sang “Silent Night” to her, a sweet transcultural moment. She was touched.

I was the one who ventured (briefly) into politics and righteousness and discovered, talking about Mr. Lump, that Kate does not understand the words “corrupt,” “mendacious,” “bully,” though she does know “dishonest” (malhonnête). The word “mendacious” is not useful in love nor in engineering: it leads to nothing. I gave up on that line of conversation and turned to writing her a limerick.

A young French woman named Kate

Came into our family late

And brought savoir-faire

And amour, mon cher,

And made our Matt a good mate.

Thanks to great leaps in engineering, Fiona is able to FaceTime with her people in China on a regular basis, very cheaply, and not feel so stranded as exchange students felt back in my day. Smart people like Kate and Matthew have bestowed great benefits: look around you. Fiona will return to China with memories of American warmth and jollity. The couples at the supper, six of us, are reminded of our own courting days, which, praise God, can continue for decades if we avoid dishonesty and bullying.

I was brought up in the midst of righteous people (no dancing, no drinking, no movies, no TV, no rambunctious play on the Lord’s Day) and have an enormous capacity for it myself, but the urge seems to diminish in old age. When in the midst of warm family feeling, an old man should put his collection of lectures in his back pocket and tend to more important business, which is sitting down beside a very shy child and trying to make her smile.

Shyness runs in my family. I have plenty of my own and am capable of sitting silent and frozen in the midst of strangers. I did a radio show and could talk a blue streak to invisible people, but in real life I still have a 13-year-old adolescent inside me. This awkwardness goes hand in hand with arrogance, which is a plague for us Democrats since we are right about almost everything.

I sat down besides my great-niece and instead of asking probing questions about her schooling, I asked, “Do you know how many counties there are in Minnesota?” She shook her head. “Eighty-seven,” I said, and I recited them rapidly in alphabetical order, “Aitkin, Anoka, Becker, Beltrami,” and so on. This made her grin. It’s a simple trick, requiring no great intelligence, and it works like a charm. She was amused. She smiled at me again when the evening ended and gave me a slight hug.

It was a hard week, a steady drizzle of anger in the news, the words “divisive” and “divisiveness” everywhere you looked, and at the risk of sounding naïve, I must say it was a pleasure to sit down to hotdish and pie in honor of young love and bite my tongue when tempted to fulminate and rant.

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Standing around, watching people suffer

The annual marathon ran by our house in St. Paul Sunday morning, a phalanx of flashing lights of police motorcycles, followed by Elisha Barno of Kenya and other African runners, and later the women’s winner, Sinke Biyadgilgn, and a stream of thousands of others, runners, joggers, walkers, limpers. For the sedentary writer standing on the curb, it’s a vision of hard work I am very grateful not to have undertaken. In the time I’d spend training to run 26 miles and 385 yards, I could write a book. When you finish a marathon, all you have to show for it is a pile of damp smelly clothes.

Our house is near the end of the course and so we stand yelling “You’re looking good!” at the runners and “It’s all downhill from here!” but after running 25 miles, most people don’t look so good. They look like refugees hustling to the dock to board the last ship leaving Gomorrah. And as the slower runners pass, it feels rather weird to be a bystander at the suffering of one’s fellow humans. Public whippings have been outlawed in this country for at least a century. It is unbecoming to take pleasure in the suffering of another.

And that was when my neighbors turned their backs on the marathon and started commingling on the sidewalk, which is the true beauty of a marathon.

It has become rare for neighbors in America to know each other. This avenue in St. Paul is a series of cloisters, people locked in small spaces and depending on media for their social awareness, and I am one of them. We work hard, fewer of us attend church, we shop at far-flung markets, and we don’t let our kids roam the neighborhood freely. And so, on Sunday morning, men and women in their skivvies jogging past, neighbors I barely know came over to say hi. This was embarrassing.

I grew up in a tight semi-rural neighborhood back in the Fifties. Families of modest means who bought an acre of cornfield and built a house on it. My family was strict evangelical Christian who believed in the imminence of the Rapture and we had Catholics to the west and an outspoken atheist to the east. He believed that when you die, you go into a hole in the ground and that’s the end of the story. He and my dad had one thing in common — they each built their own home from the ground up — and so they shared tools, consulted each other on construction problems, and when it came time for Dad to raise the roof beam, Ted came over and helped. They did not discuss theology. Dad ignored Ted’s ever-present Pall Mall and the bottle of Grain Belt. Ted avoided bad language around my dad.

We were neighbors, we made accommodations. Our family didn’t have a TV set — too worldly — but Mother adored Lucille Ball and so on Monday nights she found a reason to go next door and stand amid clouds of cigarette smoke and watch “I Love Lucy.” Once or twice, she may have given them a gospel tract, “Where Will You Spend Eternity?” But we got along.

It was the children who bound the neighborhood together. Children roamed freely back then, formed alliances, invented their own fantasy games, rode their bikes around country roads, found abandoned barns and sheds to play in, were invited into the homes of people our parents had never met and maybe didn’t approve of. From the age of seven, I was able to walk out of the house and never be asked, “Where are you going?” I simply went. I saw what I saw, no supervision, no play dates.

All the stories about angry divisiveness in the country — the neighbors standing in my driveway didn’t talk about that. What is of interest to us here are our kids, work, where we’ve been lately, and where to go to find the last of the fresh northern tomatoes. A man promised that if he found some at a roadside market he knows, he’d give me half, which is the sort of divisiveness I like.

We did not talk about how remarkable it is that we have become so distant from people who live so near. It was good for my parents to live next door to an atheist. We need a neighbor-to-neighbor exchange program. Close the streets and commingle. You don’t learn manners from social media.

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Columnist salutes a brother columnist, a red one

George Will is a great American conservative essayist and I am an aging liberal doing the best I can, but even in divisive times I am capable of appreciating him, and his recent column for the Washington Post is so excellent, a new prize is needed, the Pulitzer isn’t good enough, we need a Seltzer or a Wurlitzer. You can Google this at your leisure; “Abolish the death penalty” is the title.

For more than 30 years, Will writes, Alabama has been trying to execute a man, now 68, for a murder he committed when he had begun sinking into derangement that now is so complete that he has no recollection of the crime, and Will argues that the execution of an elderly demented invalid has little value as deterrence. Alabama has shown, Will says, “tenacity that deserves a better cause.” This week, Alabama will come to the Supreme Court and seek approval to execute a blind incontinent 68-year-old in a wheelchair whose memory is destroyed by dementia. The thought of it, to paraphrase Will, induces a “healthy squeamishness that speaks well of us.”

The column is brilliant in every detail, passionate, elegant, and leaves the reader feeling better about the country we live in — in other words, is everything the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing was not.

Mr. Will has a starchiness I admire, an ear for exactitude, and a fine sense of balance that enables him to produce long complex sentences that are so rare in journalism thanks to editors and J-school teachers who tried mightily to stamp them out but here he is, building a long pier that extends out through the glop and gloom with a green light at the end going blink blink blink blink to warn incoming schooners to be ever more alert as the destination slides into view.

George Will feels like an older brother to me, whose role is to speak freely and challenge the thinking of his siblings when they adventure into treacherous waters. If I got drunk and punched a stranger in the snoot, George would urge me to find him and apologize and he wouldn’t rest until I did. My older brother Philip would do the same. He died almost ten years ago and so has become younger than I, which is very odd. He held some liberal views but was a conservative at heart, being a believer in familial ties, stability, excellent schools, telling stories especially ones at your own expense, and mankind’s stewardship of this fragile planet we are borrowing from our grandchildren. When you met Philip, you met someone looking for common ground. He was the one who held our family together and without him, we’re like strangers in an elevator, looking up at the lighted numerals.

I have little experience at being a uniter. I grew up among separatist Christians and avoided team sports and aimed to be a writer, an obscure genius mysterious to all but a few cognoscenti. Every adolescent’s dream. The separatists of my youth were believers in the literal truth of Scripture, which gave them plenty of grounds for separation: there are forty different ways to interpret “Love thy neighbor as thyself” so if you like — and face it, there is satisfaction to be found in divorce — you can draw a line in the sand and start a new church.

I’m tired of separatism. I want to be in a big crowd and feel geniality around me, the friendly push and shove of democracy.

I like to leave Walden Pond and go out into freeway America, and line up for the breakfast of generic scrambled eggs and nondescript coffee, and overhear conversation on classic topics: How Does One Correct The Bad Parenting Of One’s Children, Today’s Music — I Don’t Get It, What I Am Going To Do One of These Days, and though I’m an old Democrat in Republican territory and the waitress who whipped the eggs voted for Mr. Wrong, I feel geniality all around.

Over in the Universe Café where righteous Democrats gather to eat organic eggs from cooperative chickens, they’re wringing their hands about something they just read a book about, but over here at Mom’s, you’re welcome so long as you clean up after yourself, don’t yell at someone for no good reason, and do good work, whatever line of work you’re in, auto repair or knife sharpening or column construction. Thank you, sir, for your good work.

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Old man goes to hear an old man sing

A sweet warm fall night, Sunday in New York, and my love and I stood outdoors with friends who, like us, had caught Paul Simon’s farewell show and were still in awe of it, a 76-year-old singer in peak form for two and one-half hours nonstop with his eminent folk orchestra. John Keats died at 25, Shelley at 29. Stephen Crane was 28. Franz Schubert was 31, and each of them had his triumphs, but Simon sustained a career as an adventurous artist and creator who touched millions of people and whose lyrics held up very well in a crowded marketplace.

When I left my home and my family

I was no more than a boy

In the company of strangers

In the quiet of the railway station

Running scared

Laying low, seeking out the poorer quarters

Where the ragged people go

Looking for the places only they would know.

Between “The Boxer” and “America” to “René and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War” to “Questions for Angels” he covered a broad swath of artistic territory and then, to my surprise, he tossed in a moldy oldie, “Bridge Over Troubled Waters,” and made it his own, as he ought to do since he wrote it. It’s a sweet anthem and he gave it some grit and feeling. He was onstage for two and-a-half hours and the spirit and emotion and sheer classiness of it were tangible. I’ve been to see him three times so you can’t call me a diehard fan, but I thought to myself, “I will never see the like of this kind of genius again.”

I am 76. Except for Paul McCartney and John Irving and a few painters, there are not many old guys still at work who are doing great things. Irving’s novel, Avenue of Mysteries, his fourteenth, came out three years ago, which the New York Times called “thoroughly modern, accessibly brainy, hilariously eccentric and beautifully human.” So was Paul Simon the other night.

If I were brainier I’d be envious, but I’m simply awestruck. And now we venture into October, when the maple trees remind us of mortality. We fight our petty battles for power and privilege and parking spaces, and then we die (yikes!) and people glance at the obit and if you’re young, like Keats and Shelley, they feel a twinge, and if you aren’t, they don’t and then they go back to telling their kids about the importance of correct grammar and good manners, as every parent should do.

In the great contest of autumn — Art & Adventure vs. Parenthood — I come down on the side of doing both all at once and accepting the consequences. My life is a series of mistakes interrupted by explosive good luck and how does one distinguish one from the other at the time? Twenty-six years ago I had lunch with the sister of a friend of my younger sister and as I write this, she is asleep in the next room. I know other people who married well, too, and they will admit, if you press hard, that this is blind luck. Meanwhile, one heeds the call of adventure.

I went into radio because I thought I had a lot to say, and maybe I did, but meanwhile it got me out of the house and into the company of amazing musicians and singers. I got a full life. I got to see Robert Altman make a movie. I got to meet Harry Blackmun for lunch, after which we walked around the block and came back to the Supreme Court and walked through a crowd of angry people protesting the decision he wrote in Roe v. Wade. None of them recognized him; his humility was his shield. His daughters asked me to sing the Whiffenpoof song at his funeral and I did, with the entire Supreme Court in black sitting before me. Everyone in the church sang along, Bill and Hillary and the Blackmun daughters, but not the Justices. They could not bring themselves to sing, “We are little black sheep who have gone astray, baa baa baa,” though they had in the Citizens United decision and others.

Paul Simon had an illustrious career but I doubt he ever sang to nine unsmiling men in black robes in the front row of a church. And then there was the live broadcast on the ball field in Lanesboro when a thunderstorm hit ten minutes before airtime and I walked into the crowd and we all sang the national anthem. Ask me about it sometime, I’ll tell you.

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Old man in his pew among the Piskies

A whole string of perfect summery September days and we sit outdoors eating our broiled fish and cucumber salad and the last of the sweet corn crop while looking at news of people stranded in flooded towns in North Carolina, unable to evacuate because they are caring for an elderly bedridden relative. They stand on their porch, surrounded by filthy floodwater, waiting for rescue, and meanwhile we pass a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé and look forward to ice cream.

This is why a man goes to church, to give thanks for blessings and to pray for the afflicted, while contemplating the imbalance, us on the terrace, them on the porch. And to write out a check for flood relief.

I go to the church where my wife and I were married twenty-three years ago in New York City. She was raised Episcopalian so I became a Piskie too, out of pure gratitude. Had she been Quaker, I would’ve quaked; had she been Jewish, hand me the Torah, Laura. My evangelical family liked Jeremiah and Ezekiel a lot more than “Blessed are the meek” and if there had been a First Pharisee church in our town, we’d have been there.

Piskies are a mixed lot, lifelongs and newcomers, believers and tourists, and this church has African and Asian elements along with us Anglos in our wingtips and herringbones. After we confess our sins and are absolved, people ramble around the sanctuary shaking hands and hugging, a cheerful and democratic moment, like recess in school. We’ve all been forgiven for our arrogance and carelessness and put that behind us and now have a chance to do better. This is enormously uplifting and then the ushers come along with the collection plates. I scribble:

I say the prayer of contrition

And see my pernicious condition,

And then in an inst-

Ant am cleansed, at least rinsed,

A sinner but a newer edition.

I trust that after I die

I will fly to my home in the sky,

But if it’s not so,

I’ll never know.

I could worry about it, but why?

And onward we go to Communion. The church is practically full and Communion takes awhile and I turn to the Communion hymn and it’s not one of the high Anglican hymns that we’re often obliged to attempt, hymns meant for a choir in white robes with cinctures and ruffled collars, with singers named Alastair, Barnaby, Cecil, and Dorian, after which there will be tea and cakes in the refectory and someone will ask about our summer in Cornwall and we’ll say, “Brilliant. Smashing.”

No, it’s not one of those hymns, it’s Low Church, so low that I associate it with Pentecostals singing in a storefront, or a revival service under a tent. It’s “Give Me Jesus.” It’s a spiritual that’s made its way into bluegrass and Christian rock, and Southern quartets have recorded it and so has Kathleen Battle and it goes:

In the morning when I rise,

In the morning when I rise,

In the morning when I rise,

Give me Jesus.

And “When I am alone” and “When I lay me down to die” — and we Episcopalians of Manhattan are seized by the power of this simple song and sing it with feeling. The music takes hold of you and no matter what was on your mind a moment ago, you give yourself to this song, and then the organ drops out on the third verse and we’re acappella and tears come to your eyes because suddenly you are not a New Yorker anymore, not a white college graduate, but are maybe out in the middle of Nebraska or Oklahoma or North Carolina, surrounded by farmers and truck drivers and their wives, most of whom voted for the real-estate developer, and you’re singing, “You can have all this world, give me Jesus.” My aunts and uncles and cousins are there who didn’t come to the wedding because it was my third marriage, and we’re all singing, “Give me Jesus.” We’re together with people who disapprove of us almost as much as we do of them and we are all singing.

It’s why a man goes to church, to be shaken, and I walked out onto the street and past the deli, the Thai restaurant, the Korean grocery, and headed home to my wife. She was looking at photographs of people stranded in their homes in North Carolina, waiting for help to arrive. Brown floodwater up to the floorboards, woman in a chair, man in the doorway, waiting.

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Old man spends Sunday among Lutherans

Back when I did a radio show in Minnesota, I liked to make fun of Lutherans for their lumbering earnestness, their obsessive moderation, their dread of giving offense. I felt obliged to make fun of them because they were the heart of my audience, but now that I’m old and out of the way, I feel obliged to do penance, and so last weekend I traveled to Bayfield, Wisconsin, to speak at an old Norwegian church, Bethesda Lutheran, celebrating its 125th anniversary there on the shore of Lake Superior. I was not paid to do this but I was offered coffee and doughnuts.

Bayfield is an old fishing and lumbering town whose main industry now is tourism. The town has tried to kill off tourism by raising the price of rooms to a Manhattan level but people still come from near and far to look at the lake. I myself would rather look at Lutherans, so I did that instead.

Bethesda is a handsome classic wooden church, high-pitched roof and steeple. You’d find it in Grant Wood and in New England landscape paintings. The sanctuary seats about 100 skinny people, or about eighty Lutherans, and it was full for the 8:30 a.m. service. The good people had put my favorite hymns in the service, “Sweet Hour of Prayer” and “Children of the Heavenly Father,” “Nearer, My God, To Thee,” and “Shall We Gather at the River,” and they sang them beautifully, as Lutherans do. Harmony is fundamental to their faith. You may disagree with them on doctrine but if you can sing alto or tenor, you’re okay.

They assigned me to read the Epistle at the service, and I noted that they’d chosen a passage from 1 Peter: “Rid yourselves, therefore, of all malice, and all guile, insincerity, envy, and all slander,” thereby paying me back for forty years of satire on the radio. I took it to heart, as one should. Envy and insincerity I’m certainly guilty of, malice and slander not so much, and guile — I don’t think so. “Guile” infers craftiness and smarts, and I plead innocent there.

They did give me a chance to speak in my own defense, which was only right, since I’d flown out from New York for the service. I began by correcting them: a pastor had said they were celebrating the 125th anniversary of “Christian worship and witness in Bayfield” and I reminded them that French Catholic missionaries such as Father Jacques Marquette, S.J., had preceded them by 200 years. They took this in good grace.

And then I said what I had come to say, which was that I love them, sincerely. They believe in kindness as a prime virtue and they believe in service to others, doing their part, chipping in, pulling their oar. Bethesda is a small church, only forty-five members, and a lady told me after the service, “We could merge with other churches, but the beauty of a small church is that everyone has to do their part, you can’t leave it to the others.”

They are a warm, accepting people. A note on the bulletin said, “We acknowledge that we worship on the traditional grounds of the Anishinaabe and we honor their elders both past and present.” And the service began with the lighting of sacred tobacco by an Ojibwe elder who played a solo on his wooden flute. He was welcomed and so was I.

I told them they remind me of my aunts who were the important people in my upbringing. I had eighteen of them. We were staunch fundamentalists, not Lutherans, and it was a time when women took a back seat, but my aunts were loving people, merciful, given to kindness, and lovingkindness triumphs over power.

There was coffee and ice cream afterward and extensive commingling, a beautiful Sunday on the shore. I talked with a couple who spend their summers taking wheelchair kids on canoe trips into the Boundary Waters and with a sailor who’d sailed from Bayfield to Norway and said, “When the weather’s rough, you depend on your boat to take care of you,” and I met old people my age who are caring for incapacitated spouses. I was glad I’d made the trip. They feel like family. I could’ve stayed all day but I had a plane to catch. So I stood in their midst and sang, “Wise men say, only fools rush in” and they all joined in and now they know. I can’t help falling in love with Lutherans.

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Old man alone on Labor Day weekend

Our long steamy dreamy summer is coming to an end and it’s time to stop fruiting around and make something of ourselves. You know it and I know it. All those days in the 90s when we skipped our brisk walk and turned up the AC and sat around Googling penguins, Szechuan, engine, honorable mention, H.L. Mencken.

It was he who said: “I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible to any public office. Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”

And so here we are today, with a leader whom 60% of the people disapprove of and who went golfing on the day of the big funeral where people talked about him without ever mentioning his name.

He was elected by friends of mine here in the Midwest who were angry and wanted a lawyer to sue the pants off the System. When you hire a lawyer, you don’t want a scholarly guy who writes elegant briefs and wins awards from the bar association, you want someone who wears briefs with revolvers on them and goes into a bar and shoves guys around. You’re not choosing a BFF, you’re choosing an attack dog, so you want a jerk and a loudmouth.

And that’s how we got where we are today, the country led by a man who is a daring liar and so nobody follows him except people on his payroll.

The amazing thing is: when all is lost, so much still remains. Invincible ignorance rules the capital, dishonesty is accepted as normal, the U.S. Senate is about to send a robot to the Supreme Court, and yet I walk around with a gizmo the size of half a slice of toast and it buzzes and I put it to my ear and talk to my wife, a smart woman who knows everything about me and yet she loves me. You can’t do better than that. To a man who has married well, Washington is of secondary, even tertiary, importance.

My goal is to live to be 92 while retaining full brain function, and medicine is on my side. I take a blood thinner to prevent lumps of blood from turning me into a moron and an anti-seizure drug so I won’t suddenly fall on the floor, thrashing and foaming at the mouth. I had magnetic resonance imaging a week ago and my brain has been fertile ever since. I couldn’t read French before and now I can. Marcel Proust, in his magnificent “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu,” describes his time doing recherche at Purdue into magnetic resonance. He was temping on the side, while working as a rechercher, and he discovered that loud noise is good for memory — banging, dinging, and the voice of his beloved Madeleine. Peace and calm lead to dementia. So I’m spending the week in New York. The doors were open at church Sunday morning and during the confession of sins, thanks to the sirens outside, I remembered Lust, which I had tried to forget. I was absolved and shook hands with other sinners and came home, feeling joyful amid the honks and the rumble of the subway.

Henry David Thoreau didn’t care for New York and he wrote: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” He was talking about men like him who go hide in the woods. Quiet easily leads to despair. In the city, I’m surrounded by the heroism of men and women who came here from far away where they were teachers and managers and now are cleaners and cabdrivers, learning English, making a life for their children. This is inspiring.

It’s a world of progress, and my only complaint is the proliferation of passwords and PIN numbers. I keep forgetting mine and have to click on “Forgot password?” and they give me a new one, A1O2q64bz, and I forget that. I feel like a blind man searching a dark room for a pair of black socks that aren’t there. And then the phone rings and it’s her. She’s boarding a plane. The flight was delayed but it will leave shortly and in two hours she’ll be home. I’m a happy man. I plan to live until 2034. Plenty of time to throw the crooks out and get a decent government in place. Meanwhile, I’ll wash the dishes and make the bed and await the key in the door.

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A man watching his own heartbeat

I lay on a couch at a clinic last week, watching my echocardiogram on a screen, and made a firm resolution, the tenth or twelfth in the past couple years, to buckle down and tend to business, fight off distraction and focus on the immediate task, walk briskly half an hour a day, eat green leafy vegetables, drink more liquids, and finish the projects I’ve been working on for years. Seeing your heartbeat is a profound moment.

Life is short. I’m no spring chicken. Chickens don’t get echocardiograms. The report from the echo and from the MRI is that I am in a reasonably gentle decline but what machines cannot detect is wiliness and that is what makes up for general atrophy and necrosis caused by infarcts. You must outsmart your decay and obsolescence.

I was on a steep glide path back in middle age, following the example of heroic literary alcoholics, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dylan Thomas, John Berryman, and so on. Most of the ambitious young male writers I knew learned to tolerate large doses of whiskey and remain upright. When the bottle was passed, you raised it. An occupational requirement.

I turned sixty and was alarmed at my intake of spirits and dreaded the prospect of group therapy and sitting in a circle of folding chairs in a church basement on Tuesday nights with other sad old men, talking about our emotionally distant fathers and lost loves that led us to this precipice — it horrified me. I was a lucky man, fortunate in my choice of parents, blessed with a dozen aunts whose extravagant love led me toward a happy career, and how was I going to make myself into a tragic figure?

So I switched from Glenlivet to iced tea. I did it one day and waited for the agony of withdrawal and it didn’t happen. I exchanged some late-night euphoria for clear-headedness in the morning. It felt like a good move.

Something similar happened with my three-pack-a-day smoke habit. A friend and I agreed to stop on the same day and to call the other on the phone before lighting another cigarette. This slight social pressure, having to admit weakness to another, was enough. The first few days were hard. I ate a lot of popcorn, spent hours in the public library, took walks, went to movies, but the deed was done.

Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have. When I was your age, I wanted brilliant success, and now I can see that what I really wanted is work, and I have plenty of it. People with plenty of work to do are less enamored of self-destruction.

It helps that I am in love with one woman, which eliminates a vast amount of longing and lusting, stargazing, brooding, pleading, the misery of rejection, all of which is very time-consuming, and instead I simply focus on life itself and her in particular. It helps that she is loving, funny, fascinating, more knowledgeable in all practical matters, but the time saved by marital fidelity is the point here. I was married twice before and had some serious girlfriends and it’s an enormous relief to be done, done, done with romance, except for the woman lying across from me in bed, doing a crossword under the reading lamp, whose bare arm I reach over and touch.

The young people whom I know personally are not captivated by the romance of self-destruction and I admire their freedom. The economy is harder on them than it was in my day — I paid for my freshman year in college by washing dishes (no longer possible) — and of course there are interesting drugs around, but the romance of misery is diminished, and many people who back in the day would’ve written dark incoherent poetry are going into standup comedy instead. Good for them. It’s honest work and, unlike most poets, comics know when they’ve done a good job and when they haven’t.

The capable, amiable young woman in blue scrubs who inserts the IV for the dye for the MRI did well in math and science, I’m sure. I hope she enjoys her job. I’d rather she weren’t working on a novel about assisted suicide, but okay, never mind. I want her to meet some friends after work for wine and laugh about their supervisors and go home to people who love her entirely.

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September 1, 2001

A June 5, 1999, rebroadcast from Butte, Montana, with singer/songwriter Stephanie Davis, plus a special appearance by Robin and Linda Williams.

Get full details…>>

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