Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 71

Time passes except when it suddenly leaps backward

Snow on the ground in Minnesota and a frosty grayness in the air and a delicious chill that makes a person feel alive and vibrant. Cold is a stimulant, but of course some people don’t tolerate it well and they decamp for the Sun Belt and — don’t tell anyone I said this — everything works better when those old people leave town. Traffic flows, the line at checkout moves faster without querulous oldsters demanding a discount on bruised bananas, you don’t have fifteen cars waiting at the drive-up ATM while some old coot tries to remember his PIN number. I can say this because I’m 76. If you said it, you’d be accused of ageism, which it is, but past the age of 70, one is entitled.

It’s the Age of Sensitivity. A house down the street has hung up Christmas lights, but as I look closer, I see that alongside the star of Bethlehem is a Star of David and also a star inside a crescent moon with an inscription in Arabic. These people are liberals, like me, but their inclusivity strikes me as show-offy — and why did they leave out Buddhism and Hinduism? And how will agnostics feel when they see this?

Last month, I went to the grocery store and I asked a clerk where I’d find the dairy case and she told me and I said, “Thank you, kid” and she said, “I don’t accept people infantilizing me.” She was in her fifties. I was stunned. I told the manager I wanted to apologize to the woman and he said, “Don’t worry about it. She is nougat intolerant and it makes her hypersensitive, though I’m not supposed to use that word, and if you report me, I’ll deny everything.”

In the Minnesota I knew, there was very little sensitivity. We played hockey on backyard rinks with rolled-up magazines for shin pads. It was bitterly cold. Kids whacked me with their sticks, I was pelted with insults — dodo, dummy, dimwit, moron — until, a few years ago, I was diagnosed as being “at the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum” and I got a card to carry in my wallet: “I am an autist, high-functioning but with limits. Please be patient.”

The big cultural shift came with the introduction of no-smoking areas in the Sixties, after the Surgeon General’s report. Back then, everyone smoked except sissies and pantywaists, and then suddenly it was uncool. I loved smoke and still do, though now I limit myself to pre-inhaled smoke. But the ban on smoking was followed by rules about joking and poking and then a city ordinance was passed forbidding the custom of “Ladies First” as patronizing: women demanded the right to open doors for themselves. Church attendance plunged due to the threatening language of the Bible.

In the old days, threats were everywhere. Parents yelled at their kids, kids yelled at each other. That’s why I’m not a hugger; when someone takes a step toward me, I step back. In the old days, someone stepped toward you, they’d say, “Look down there” and you looked down and they stuck a foot behind you and shoved you and yelled, “Doughnuts!” I grew up with that.

(Meanwhile, Individual-1 is still in power, a man straight off the grade school playground of 1954, swiping candy from the weak, pushing, shoving, depantsing people. He enjoys a latitude of rudeness denied to the rest of us and half the population approves of this.)

The other morning at the coffee shop, I said, “Good morning, dear” to the barista. I knew I shouldn’t say it but she had given me such a sweet smile, I thought maybe she is the granddaughter of an old classmate, maybe she loves my writing. She stiffened when I deared her. She said, “You are using your power position as a customer to imply an intimate relationship that doesn’t exist and thereby enjoy a fantasy that is demeaning to me.” I said, “Your smile implied a personal relationship and made me think I might know you and simply had forgotten your name.” She said, “You’re out of your mind.” And I showed her my Autist card. She said, “I am so sorry. I had no idea you were mentally handicapped.” And then she recognized her mistake, using the forbidden h-word. I told the manager and she was fired. I got a gift certificate for two dozen lattes. Cool.

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Having reached the end, he continues

The real news these days is about science, and last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that life expectancy is dropping in the U.S., and the American male’s average life expectancy is 76.1 years, a figure I reached in October. My expiration date has passed. This comes as a shock, to think that I’m expected to die now, in a state of ignorance, still trying to figure out the basics (What am I here for? Why do rainy days make me happy? Where are my glasses?).

The CDC says life expectancy is declining due to substance abuse and an increase in suicide rates, neither of which apply to me, unless the substances include coffee or unless they now consider lack of daily strenuous exercise to be suicidal. So I am hopeful that I will exceed the average. My dad made it to 88, my mom to 97, so I am counting on reaching 94.

President George Bush reached 94 and that is why his eulogies have been so kind and gentle. The world is not generally so kind to oilmen and Texas Republicans, especially one known for his tangled syntax, whose job for a time was to defend Richard Nixon, but Mr. Bush, as a one-termer, got into less trouble and he outlived his controversies. And he was married to a gallant woman who once said, “I married him because he made me laugh.” A Republican could hope for no greater recommendation.

On the heels of the CDC report came the news from China — the birth of the first genetically edited babies — the door opening to a whole new phase of history, well-designed human beings. Babies coming down the chute, each with an IQ of 143, no allergies or addictive tendencies, no syndromes or complexes, good teeth and strong bones, and eyes and hair in your choice of the many colors available.

We 76.1-year-olds shudder at the thought but we know that our descendants will accept this as commonplace, just as we accept social media as a useful replacement of actual conversation. Designer babies: why not?

I grew up with kids who were deeply flawed in so many ways. There was no therapy back then, just people yelling at you to shape up. I was a very quiet boy, kept to myself, didn’t say much — which back then people thought meant I was gifted, so I went along under that illusion — now they’d say “high-functioning end of the autism spectrum” but autism hadn’t been invented yet — so I was gifted instead. Ignorance spared us from knowing the severity of our problems.

Cruelty was rampant in the schoolyard of my day. We played Pom-pom-pullaway and for most of us it was enough to simply tag a runner, not tackle, kick, or bite him, but for others it was open warfare. In the boys’ lavatory, you had to beware of boys who, as you stood at the trough, would jerk your trousers up so that you’d wet yourself. I’ve lost track of the bullies in my class — I assume they’re in federal penal institutions — and would I feel deprived if genetic editing had been around back then so that everyone would be just as nice as I? I don’t think so.

I sat at supper last night next to a friend with a basketball under her blouse, a little girl fetus due to make her big entrance in mid-January, and so the future is on my mind and what sort of life this heroine will enjoy. She’ll grow up in a house in the woods and I hope the natural world brings her pleasure and at the same time she comes to love our language and to devour it in books. I hope she’ll have a dog. When I am 92, I’d love to see her, tall and rangy, take a pass, go high in the air, and hit a swisher from the free-throw line. Or sit at a piano and play a Chopin étude. Or both. And one day a door will open — maybe math, physics, history, poetry, art — and she’ll go marching through it.

Meanwhile, I must figure out what to do with these bonus years I have coming to me. At 76.1, one’s world gets smaller, the ambition to triumph and conquer has pretty much receded. My glasses sit beside the computer, next to the coffee cup, and there is bread in the kitchen waiting to be toasted and spread with peanut butter. Onward.

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One more week, its little successes, etc.

It’s a father’s duty to take at least one long trip with each of his children, the two of you, nobody else along, and now that my daughter and I have traveled by rail, the old 20th Century Limited route from Chicago to New York, the trip Cary Grant took with Eva Marie Saint in North By Northwest, we are ready to take another. Nineteen hours from Chicago’s magnificent Union Station to Manhattan’s wretched Penn Station, including a fast run along the Mohawk and Hudson rivers, and the bond between young woman and her old man is sealed solid.

Highly recommended, especially for us newspaper readers constantly fussed-up over national crises — from a train, you see the solidity of the country, its infrastructure, factories, warehouses, everything working remarkably well.

And now I return to business, which is to move from a big house to a small apartment. I have a habit of taking off my glasses and setting them down and wandering away and forgetting where I set them, which means spending time roaming around searching for them, so we’re moving to a modest apartment to reduce the search area.

The house is in St. Paul, built in 1919  by a prosperous lumbering family (by which I mean a family that was in the lumber business, not a family of heavyset persons who clomp around awkwardly). We bought it because it was sunny and looked out at the Mississippi and now, ten years later, too busy to throw the big raucous parties that the house deserves, a band playing on the terrace, people doing the Lindy Hop and jumping into the fountain, the gin flowing, we’re looking for a buyer. Our friends don’t jump into fountains; they sit around and discuss the crisis in public education.

Meanwhile, I look back at hundreds of hours wasted looking for glasses: a crisis for a man of 76, though, being a writer, I am no stranger to wasted time: wastage comes with the territory. You sit down with a brilliant idea and a few weeks later you have fifty-five pages of mishmash and goulash. It happens to every writer. If physicians worked as effectively as we, their waiting rooms would be littered with dead bodies.

My one success last week was a sonnet, written at 5 a.m. on the day I realized was our wedding anniversary, an original sonnet written out in a clear cursive hand and set on the breakfast table for my wife to find. I heard her sigh with pleasure and she came into my workroom and threw her arms around me. One poem, one reader, one tight protracted embrace: success. The New York Review of Each Other’s Books will not give it a grudging review (“Marriage Sonnet somehow lacks the dark edge of Mr. Keillor’s work at its best”). It represents an hour of work well spent.

This is why a man takes up writing as a profession rather than plumbing or serving in Congress. What can a Congressperson offer his or her lover? A souvenir calendar? Your name on a rest stop on an interstate?

A writer’s situation is so ordinary — it’s like going to a big family dinner and you are seated next to an in-law you’ve never met and you must somehow make conversation. Where to start? She is nicely dressed, fiftyish, glasses, and you want to ask, “What do you do?” but it’s too blunt. So you say, “This morning I spent half an hour looking for my glasses. I need to get a chain to hold them but I hate how they look.”

Either we’ll have a conversation or she will find an excuse to go in the kitchen and pretend to be helpful. Either one is preferable to silence.

It was easy, talking to my daughter on the train. I talked about her childhood to see how far her memory stretches back. She was a joyful child. She was slow to talk, still monosyllabic when other children were speaking in sentences and using the subjunctive mood, but she got vast pleasure from the company of others. She was a hugger and snuggler. She still is.

Writers don’t hug. We try to get close to people by writing to them. Or we get on a train at night and we talk as the lights of cities flash past. Fort Wayne, Cleveland, Toledo. “I love you, Dad,” she says, apropos of nothing and everything. I love you, too, sweetheart.

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A great task lies before us, but first we sleep

Small sorrows speak; great sorrows are silent. My current small sorrow is a daily flood of junk e-mail — cheap insurance, health nostrums, hernia repair, free loans, travel discounts, an app to find out if your spouse is unfaithful — a stream of crap generated in Orlando. In tiny print at the bottom is “If you wish to unsubscribe, click here,” and I click there and the stuff keeps coming, an infestation of electronic cockroaches.

Meanwhile the great sorrow, the troubled state of our democracy, hangs in the air, the beloved country riven by dishonesty and invincible ignorance.

So I’m taking a vacation from the news. There’s a red tide of it daily and a person needs to think his own thoughts and partake in the joys of every day, so I don’t click on the news icons on my toolbar. It’s very satisfying, like looking at the gin bottle on the shelf and not putting it to your lips and draining it, but living your life instead.

At the moment, my house is in chaos because we’re moving from a big roomy house to a smallish apartment, which has brought us face to face with decades of materialism. We now see that we own a great deal of stuff that (1) we don’t use, (2) we have no attachment to, and (3) we need to rid ourselves of. Truckloads of stuff have gone out the door and there is yet more.

My particular problem is the compulsive purchase of books. Shelves of heavy tomes, classics of Western civilization, dozens of dictionaries, atlases, the complete works of great authors, two bookcases of biographies, enough books to occupy all my waking hours until I am four hundred and one years old. I bought them myself, bag by bag, out of the lust for breadth of knowledge and now I am loading them into boxes and hauling them to the car.

I thought it’d be painful, the defenestration of my library, but it is exhilarating — to feel the burden of my pretensions lighten as I drop my long-running impersonation of an educated man and return to being just another elderly barefoot peasant, one who loves his fireplace on a chilly November night and a warm supper with his good wife across the table and some light gossip and then the great pleasure of undressing in the dark and slipping in under the covers and lying next to her and taking her hand. I do not take the complete essays of Michel de Montaigne to bed with me; I would rather have her.

I think it was Montaigne who said that the best sign of wisdom is cheerfulness. I read that when I was in college, at a time when we ambitious literati felt that the true sign of brilliance was agony and desperation, and so we attempted to impersonate it though we were children of privilege — even I, the postal worker’s son, had the great luxury of an inexpensive college education, financed by me washing dishes in the cafeteria, a liberal arts education that encouraged me to imagine myself as an artist, a novelist. And so I surrounded myself with books.

I think it was also Montaigne who said that you cannot be wise on another man’s wisdom. I could reach for my phone and Google it and get the exact words but I don’t want to let go of her hand. She has spent a busy month clearing out the house and playing viola in the pit at the opera. I was away from home most of last week and she was plagued by insomnia, and now she is falling asleep. A month ago I was an intellectual striving to make intelligent comment on the new world of 2018 and now I am an elderly peasant whose physical presence helps his beloved to sleep. Some would see this as a loss of status; I do not. I lie in the marital bed, her hand relaxes, which makes me happy, and I turn out the light. I imagine myself back to 1948 and Uncle Jim’s farm. He lifts me up onto Prince’s back who is hitched to the hayrack along with Scout. My face is against his mane, my arms around his neck. Off we trot to the meadow to rake up hay, the harness jingling, Uncle Jim clucking to the horses, the sweetness of new-mown grass in my nostrils, and that is all there is, there is no more.

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What happened Sunday, in case you missed it

Church was practically full last Sunday, with a few slight gaps for skinny fashion models but otherwise S.R.O., and everyone was in an amiable mood what with several babies present for baptism, and then the organ rang out the opening hymn, the one with “teach me some melodious sonnet sung by flaming tongues above” in it, an exciting line for us Episcopalians who rarely get into flaming stuff, and I sang out from the fifth pew near some babies and their handlers, some of whom weren’t familiar with this famous hymn of Christendom, though later, around the baptismal font, they would pledge to renounce the evil powers of this world and bring up the child in the Christian faith, but their ignorance of “Come thou fount of every blessing” suggested that they might bring up the child to play video games on Sunday morning, but what the hey, God accepts them as they be and though with some reluctance so must we, and I’m sorry this sentence got so long.

I was brought up evangelical and got baptized when I was 15, the morning after a hellfire sermon in which the evangelist suggested strongly that our car was likely to be hit by a fast train on our way home and we’d all be killed and ushered into eternity to face an angry God. I was the third child in a family of six and the thought that my five siblings and two parents would lose their lives on my account weighed heavily and so in the morning, as a life-saving measure, I asked to be baptized, and Brother John Rogers led me into Lake Minnetonka, I in white trousers and white shirt, he in a blue serge suit, shirt and tie, and immersed me in the name of the Holy Spirit. I have been careful crossing railroad tracks ever since.

Our church sent around a questionnaire a month ago, asking, “Why do you come to church?” and I still haven’t filled it out. For one thing, I go because I read stories in the newspapers about declining church attendance and I hate to be part of a trend. For another, church is a sanctuary from thinking about myself, my work, my plans for the week, my problems with work, my view of DJT and my PSA and most recent MRI, my lack of exercise, other people’s view of me, myself, and I, and frankly I’m sick of myself and so would you be if you were me. My mind drifts during the homily — the acoustics amid Romanesque splendor are truly lousy — and my thoughts turn to my beautiful wife and our daughter and various friends and relatives, Lytton and Libby, Bill Hicks the fiddler, Peter Ostroushko, Fiona the Chinese exchange student, and I pray for them. I pray for solace and sustenance in their times of trial and I ask God to surprise them with the gift of unreasonable joy. I pray for people caring for parents suffering from dementia and people caring for children who are neurologically complicated. I pray for the whales, the migrating birds, the endangered elephants.

And then the homily’s over and we confess our sins and are forgiven and everyone shakes hands and goes forward for Communion, a small wafer and a swallow of wine. Then a blessing and a closing triumphant hymn as the clergy and deacons process down the aisle and then I go home.

It’s an hour and a half with no iPhone, no news. Last week is erased, bring on Monday. The babies will grow up to be impatient with orthodoxy and eager to be other than whatever their parents are, but it was holy water they were splashed with, not Perrier, and who knows but what they might wander back into church one day and appreciate the self-effacement it provides.

Man does not live by frozen pizza alone. Sunday does not need to be like Saturday or Monday. Turn down the volume, dim the bright flashing lights of ambition, look into your heart, think about the others, one by one. As part of the service, you get to reach around, right, left, forward, back, and say a blessing on them all (“The Peace of God be with you”) and when else do you get to do that? Not in the produce section of the supermarket. People need to be blessed. Shouting and sarcasm and insult have not worked, so move on. God loves you, reader. Bless you for coming this far. Go in peace.

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The old man repents of his materialism

Standard Time returned in a cold rain on Sunday but no matter. I’m an old man and every day is beautiful. My past is gone, my future is shrinking, and so when I open my eyes in the morning and don’t see angels bending over me, I’m grateful for another day on Earth. There will be no cold rain in Heaven and I will miss that and the chance to complain about it. I went in the bathroom when I awoke and closed the door so that if I fell down with a massive heart attack, I wouldn’t wake my wife, and I put my pants on, left leg first, then the right, not leaning against the wall, for the sheer excitement of it. Some mornings it’s like mounting a bucking horse. And then downstairs to the coffeepot and back to work on my memoir.

I have a moral obligation to write one because as a boy I rode on the hayrack with Uncle Jim who let me hold the reins and say “Ckkk ckkk” to Prince and Scout as they pulled us out to the meadow to rake up hay. I saw my grandma wring a goose’s neck and chop its head off. I saw the old crank phone on the wall. I remember when schoolkids worked hard on penmanship. I remember when there were forbidden peep shows on the back streets where men sneaked in to see pictures of scantily clad girls. Nowadays, the peep show is in your computer and the only way to stop people from looking at it is to poke their eyes out.

My dear wife and I are in the process of disposing of stuff as we leave a big house for an apartment. It is astonishing how much stuff two people can accumulate that they (1) do not need and (2) don’t enjoy. Unread books we’ll never read, meaningless memorabilia, clothes we’ve outgrown, mysterious tools, ugly art. I do not comment on her thousands of beauty products: I am grateful for her beauty and let it go at that.

In the midst of this disposal, we’ve also decided to not take a February vacation to Berlin. We’ve been together long enough to know that vacations are hazardous. I remember the three-week Death March To The Pacific Coast in 1986 with my then-wife and her three unhappy teenagers with wires in their ears. She proposed this as a bonding experience. Note the use of the term “then-wife.” Thirty days in the county jail would have done us as much good.

A few years ago, my now-wife and I rented a house on the Florida panhandle and sat in it for two weeks, listening to rain on the roof. We had brought great literature that we were ashamed of never having read, Proust and Melville and Virginia Woolf, and we used them as coasters as we sat and watched TV and never mentioned whose idea this was (hers), just sucked it up, trying hard to be cheerful.

My wife mentioned that vacation recently and a whole string of other disastrous vacations and what they had in common was that they were Planned. Planning is the culprit. We Americans are meant to be nomads, fluttering about on a whim, living in tents with precious few possessions. You buy a house because it’s what respectable people do and then you fill it up with stuff you don’t want or need, but the stuff doesn’t make you happy: experiences do.

I married a woman who makes me happy, the sight of her, her voice, her wit, her stories, and I could be happy living with her in a late-model motor home. We’d have to give up gardening but I’m okay with that. Park by the Grand Canyon for a week until we get tired of grandeur and then move to the Kansas plains. Then Arkansas. Georgia.

The deal has not yet gone through on the apartment. There is time to reverse course. No more plumbing problems: we’ll use public facilities in campgrounds from now on. No more dinner parties — they’re always about an hour too long — we’ll use FaceTime instead. We owned a house so we’d have an address for Visa to send the bills to, but now there’s e-mail. Call the agent, darling. I’ll get the RV. One suitcase apiece, plus beauty products. It’s a big country. Let’s go see it. Call for a dumpster. We can be heading for New Orleans by Friday.

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The old man is learning to dance

I went to a fundraiser for my daughter’s school Saturday and wandered out in search of relief and found myself trapped on the dance floor among demented teens writhing and jerking to the throb of a DJ’s explosive sound unit and there was my girl, in a circle of girls holding hands, bouncing around in a tribal ceremony unknown to me, an old man from the Era of Dance Partners. One more reminder, as if I needed it, that soon I must take the Long Walk out onto the ice pack and not return.

I love being old among young people. With old people, you learn too much about orthopedics and the lamentations are repetitive. Young people are sort of charmed to be around someone in his mid-70s (me). They wonder what it’s like. (A vast improvement over middle age.) They try to think of questions about the Sixties, like “Did you know Bob Dylan?” No, but I know people who knew him and he still owes them money.

I love their eagerness. It takes my mind off my own perverse sense that the happier you are, the more likely it is that something awful is about to happen. I’ve had this since I was young, perhaps a result of an evangelical upbringing.

Rich famous people die stupidly of drug overdoses because their handlers didn’t dare say, “Stop that.” Tycoons feel invincible and put their faith in nostrums and perish from curable diseases. Buddy Holly got in a plane with a young pilot who, awed by celebrity, didn’t dare say, “I’m not comfortable about flying by instrument in this snowstorm” and so he misread his instrument panel and flew the plane into the ground.

A tall man has a longer way to fall; a happy man has more to lose.

I’m a lucky man, which makes me wary. I went to Mayo for the annual digital prostate exam and expected the doctor to say, “You have a brain tumor and it’s wrapped around the left anterior cerebral axis where language is stored.” I say, “How can you tell I have a brain tumor when you’ve got your hand up my —” and he says, “Guess.” So I go in for the operation and wake up and it’s all gone — gone! — heebie-jeebies, hobo, humbug, hobnob, goombah, moolah, doodad, diddly-squat, my entire vocabulary — all I can do is point or nod or shake my fist — I went in an author and I come out mute.

Except it doesn’t happen. I’m okay. But still I drive with such caution I become a traffic hazard. I step into the shower gingerly, recalling men my age who slipped on wet tile and crunched a vertebra and began a long journey through chiropractic and holistic humming and the application of warm organic compresses and finally orthopedic surgery, and now a steady diet of Vicodin.

So I count my blessings. I married well. I am sitting pretty. And thus far, it is possible to make coffee, put bread in the toaster, and open the newspaper without a password that includes at least one numeral and one capital letter.

The spirit of America is enterprise, and young people have it. I visited two of them on Sunday, 30-year-olds, a writer and his wife, a photographer, who decided to leave New York City and move to a little town three hours north. The cost of living in the city is such that they’d have to give up their dreams and go to work as assistant executive vice presidents in charge of execution, and so they bought a rundown little house on two acres of wooded land and are busy repairing and painting. She’s an elegant woman I’m used to seeing in slim black dresses and there she was in Carhartts, yanking off rotted siding with a hammer.

It was a joy to be with them, to absorb some of their enthusiasm, the boldness of their big move, the talk about starting a family.

And me? I’m embarking on a new career as a playwright. A big adventure. Who knows where it leads? Maybe nowhere. I met a man a month ago who sailed his 18-foot sailboat across the Atlantic to Norway, the land of his ancestors, and a Norwegian stood on the dock in Oslo and looked down at the boat and said, “You Americans are such optimists.” I hope we are. The alternative is living with nameless dread. I’d rather get out on the floor and dance.

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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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