Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 8

Sitting in an airport, thinking about luck

I once, in Detroit, discovered I’d left my anti-seizure meds and blood thinner back in New York and needed to step into a drugstore and negotiate with a pharmacist for an emergency refill. He was dubious about emergency meds, wanted to see a prescription or at least an empty bottle, but a lady pharmacist recognized my voice from the radio, having been a fan of my show, and she also was his boss so thanks to a long radio career I was spared a stroke or a heart attack that morning.

Life offers us magical connections, which astonish us and for which we are grateful. I loved that show, did it for forty years, and it was all because my fundamentalist family refused to buy a TV back when everyone was getting one so I was left with a Zenith radio and listened to the last of the old radio shows, Fibber McGee and Gunsmoke and Fred Allen, which I loved, and twenty years later I launched a show with cowboys and a detective and small-town folks in it, and enough time had passed so that it was considered a novelty, not an imitation, and suddenly I had a career, one I never planned on.

My hero John Updike liked the show and even sent me a fan letter — to be praised by a man I revered was a tremendous shock — and he snuck me into the American Academy of Arts & Letters, of which he was president, and I went to the ceremony up on 155th Street and stood among my betters and behaved myself and tried to look distinguished.

I do believe, though she will deny it, that my Academy membership was one reason my beloved decided to marry me, not that I went around wearing a badge, but I invited her to an Academy dinner and Calvin Trillin came over and said hello, which impressed her, and also David Sedaris and Francine Prose and Jane Smiley. And Philip Roth was there, the author of Goodbye, Columbus and Herzog. He didn’t say hello to me but he said hello to John Updike who said hello to me. It was only one factor in her decision, there were others — good looks, correct pronunciation of difficult words, good manners, the fact I was infatuated with her — but being an academician set me apart from other guys from Anoka, Minnesota.

I was 50 when I met her. I had had two marital learning experiences and was ready for the grand finale. By sheer good luck, I had outlived Fitzgerald by six years, Buddy by 28, my cousin Roger by 33. Talk about terrible luck: he had dived off a boat to impress a girl he had a crush on, forgetting that he couldn’t swim, unaware that she wasn’t attracted to boys. Back then, “gay” simply meant “lively and vivacious.”

It’s bad luck to say it but I say it anyway: I’m the luckiest person you ever knew. I was brought up by fundamentalists who spent a great deal of time in Jeremiah and Isaiah but I made a career as a humorist. In high school choir, Mrs. Hallenberg asked me and a few others to only move our lips, please, and not sing. Despite a strict upbringing, I’ve written dozens of pretty good limericks and a few excellent ones, including:

There was an attractive stockbroker

Who beat everybody at poker.

Her blouse was revealing

And also concealing

The Queen of Hearts and the Joker.

And now today, my flight out of JFK was delayed and I missed my connection in Salt Lake City and had to spend five hours waiting for the next flight to Tucson and in that time, I wrote this column and I also discovered the best macaroni and cheese I’ve ever had in my life. Macron à la fromage.

Every mishap leads to good fortune. And so I conclude that there is no reason to plan ahead, scope things out, seek recommendations. I met my beloved because her sister was a classmate of my sister and I ran into her one day and when she heard that I lived in New York, she said, “My sister lives in New York” and I said, “Oh, really?” and it was the luckiest Oh, really of my life. Good things come in threes. Everyone is the judge of their own good luck. Nothing bad but what there is some good in it. God never shuts one door but what He opens another. If ifs and ands were pots and pans there’d be no trade for tinkers. What else can I tell you that you don’t already know?

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A good man gone to glory

When Chip Carter spoke about his father, Jimmy, at a memorial service in Atlanta and told how, when his dad noticed the boy got a poor mark in Latin, Jimmy studied Latin so that he could teach his son, I recognized a standard of fatherhood a good deal higher than my own and I felt bad for a moment until I recalled that it wasn’t my father’s level of fatherhood either. He was a father of six kids and I recall that when I got a C in math, it was my problem and he didn’t get involved.

That was the advantage of growing up in a big family. An only child was under tremendous pressure, observed closely by mom and dad, expected to excel in scholastics and also deportment and personal charm, whereas I, the invisible middle child, was free to lie in a dark space under the basement stairs reading adventure fiction by flashlight.

Jimmy’s trademark was honesty, and as a boy I managed to avoid that as well. When people asked me, “How are you?” I said, “Fine.” “How is school?” “Good.” Telling the truth only led to more questions. We lived near the Mississippi and Mother was fearful that one of us might drown and so I learned to lie when I’d been swimming in the river and this facility has served me well in adult life. A friend brings her wild misbehaving grandchild to visit and I say, “She has so much energy.” A niece introduces me to her gloomy fiancé with eye makeup and an aluminum sport coat, I tell her “You look so happy.” A friend wants me to read his nephew’s poetry and I say, “It’s very engaging.” The kid is 20. He knows how to put a couple dozen cryptic lines on a page that defy interpretation and I don’t want to use the term “monkey manure” and thereby lose the friendship and “engaging” is not what I’d consider praise, nothing that might lead the kid to waste his twenties writing the unreadable.

I expect honesty from my cardiologist and from my sweetheart. I married her for her honesty. I know she loves me and she won’t let me leave the apartment with my fly open or a blob of toothpaste on my cheek. I also recognize a certain narrowing of her eyes when she looks at me in company and it says, “What you just said does not represent you at your best.” Time to correct myself.

I’m a grown-up and I don’t need praise though a historian whose work I admire sent me a fan letter that meant the world to me, but I don’t need more. Some books of mine got fervent praise, others tepid, but none of it made a big impression on me. Praise drifts around like spritzes of aromatic cologne but what matters is the love of rewriting and re-rewriting and revision of the re-rewrite, and then the revision of that, and so on. Professional violinists I know love daily practicing. They return to the Brandenburg No. 6 as a fresh challenge though they’ve been there dozens of times. For a writer, nothing is ever finished. I never read a book of mine after its published because I’ll find flaws in it that can’t be fixed. Too late.

There’s no sense in looking back. You’re always standing on the verge of something new, something you expect to be the best you’ve ever done. If you didn’t think so, why bother?

Which makes adulation of a president as a monarch so weird and to see his election or defeat as a tidal shift in the nation — e.g., the myth of the New Frontier despite Kennedy’s having been elected with a tiny 118,000 vote margin out of 68 million cast. The lives of his family were warped by that myth. Jimmy Carter escaped that. He was defeated and returned to Plains with his wife, Rosalynn, to the small ranch-style home they’d built in 1960. The two of them worked as volunteers building houses for Habitat for Humanity. He taught Sunday School, took up good causes such as human rights and the campaign to eradicate Guinea worm disease, and, as their son said in his eulogy, when one of them was hospitalized, a bed was brought in for the other to sleep in the same room. Historians will do what they will, but the man managed to live his own life as who he was, not as a bird in a silver cage. May angels bear him to his rest.

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Please be hesitant, Mr. President

One man can do only so much and rather than deal with the prospect of war with Panama or Denmark, I’ve decided to think about winter, seeing as I’m spending a couple weeks down South and feel guilty about it, as I well should. It was bitterly cold when I left New York and when I got in the cab to go to JFK I was wearing no overcoat, no scarf or gloves, and the cabbie looked over his shoulder, wondering if he was going to have to contend with a lunatic. Meanwhile, dear friends of mine in Washington, D.C., employees of the deep state, are dealing with a blizzard, and friends in Alaska are living in darkness, and up in Toronto when Justin Trudeau announced his resignation as prime minister, he was brief; it was freezing, he didn’t want to be seen speaking in a pitiful trembly voice.

I’m 82 and so the prospect of a war of annexation with Canada doesn’t affect me personally, but I’d only point out that Republican states (PA, MI, ND, MT) with thinly defended borders would be easily invaded and if the war extends from January 20 into February and March, the wily Canucks may have some advantages. And when we win and our northern border extends deep into the Arctic, federal officials from Florida may be flying to the far reaches of Manitoba and be unable to play golf for extended periods of time. Just saying.

As a Minnesotan, I believe winter is a crucial part of growing up; it teaches you how to be happy under adverse conditions. Florida is fine for the sickly and delicate and those nearing the end of life’s journey, but the Lutheran Church should open dozens of winter camps for young Floridians to experience sleeping in a tent when it’s ten below zero, as I did when I was a Boy Scout. You lie in a close cluster of other Scouts, toasty warm but exhaling frost, and having eaten a hearty meal of mushroom stew and roasted squirrel, you face that inevitable moment when you must venture out alone and move your bowels. You don’t want to do it but you must. You drop your trousers, grab hold of a tree, squat and do your business, cleaning yourself with leaves, making sure they’re not poison ivy. You remember this for the rest of your life.

Winter is a pleasure, if you know what to do. You wear a scarf and gloves when you go out to play pond hockey and you keep warm by playing vigorously. Your face feels the chill, you breathe freezing air, but you are quite happy dashing around. The goalie needs to wear a heavy coat but you don’t. It’s exhilarating. Poets get awfully cold, sitting in a snowdrift, pen and paper in hand, and so most winter poems are about death. But runners do okay, snow shovelers, trash haulers, and of course old men who sit by the fire drinking ginger tea and reminiscing about their youth are just fine.

Winter is an excellent time for the young. The old people stay indoors but the young go out to wait for your school bus on minus-20 mornings, and you feel liberated. Snow is falling, headlights appear through the haze, you crouch in the ditch with a big snowdrift as a windbreak. The bears are hibernating, the timber wolves live farther north in tall-pine country, but there are coyotes around and of course snow snakes, so you learn to fend them off.

The best defense against coyotes is to crouch low and bare your teeth and make a low chuffing sound like a stallion makes, and the way to defend against snow snakes is to use foul language, which was a valuable lesson for a good Christian boy like me. “Heck” and “darn” and “shucks” and “dadburn it” will not get the job done, you must venture into the dark corners of the English language. I am an old man who never employs profanity, as my friends know very well, but in defense of my wife and daughter against vicious arctic reptiles I am prepared to go all the way.

I worry about children growing up in Florida, whether the year-round relaxation may leave them incapable of self-defense if the vicious Danes should attack America’s soft underbelly, spreading poisonous pastries to knock off the unsuspecting, in cahoots with maniacal Panamanians wielding pans of pernicious fishes from their isthmus. And let Mexico keep the gulf. We have golf. That’s enough.

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It’s never too late to be normal

I know something about elitism, having grown up in the exclusive Sanctified Brethren — we refused to commune with 99.85% of Christendom, we looked down on Baptists, Anglicans, you name it, we found fault with them all, and if a Lutheran guy made off with one of our young women, we forced ourselves to attend the wedding though it was actually a funeral. And then I got a job in public radio where I got to see elitism from below. I was a mere entertainer in the midst of serious journalists and scholars, and I was seriously looked down upon by many people whom income from my show was supporting. But then parents of teenagers have gone through the same thing and survived and I did too.

I sort of regret that I didn’t become truly elite when Minnesota almost became part of New France, this territory having been “discovered” by French explorers, and France battled the English for dominance here but then Louis XV was more interested in sugar from the Caribbean than fur from the North and so he withdrew and Voltaire said, “All we lost was a few acres of snow.” This remark still stings, centuries later. We could’ve grown up speaking French and saying “Joie de vivre” with real élan and “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” and “C’est la vie” instead of saying “Well, that’s life,” which doesn’t have anything like the savoir faire of “C’est la vie.” And with “C’est la vie,” you don’t need to stick the “well” in front of it to sound casual.

French is an elegant language and we envy it, and if a fellow American tosses off a French phrase such as “S’il vous plaît,” we see him as an elitist and take it as a cue to drop our own pretensions and admit that we don’t like boeuf bourguignon nearly so much as we like meatloaf, that a French label does not make the wine superior.

What brings this to mind is the new movie, “A Complete Unknown,” which gives Bob Dylan fans the chance to be even more fascinated by their own obsession about the man, as a poet, prophet, visionary genius, and the Voice of a Generation, but to me, a Minnesotan of his era, it’s all rather amusing. We knew plenty of male undergraduates in the Sixties who practiced being oblique and self-contradictory and affected mystery. It was a style. There was one at every party in Minneapolis, sometimes two and then one of them had to leave. They wanted to be considered poets, prophets, geniuses, but you need more than ambiguity.

The Prophet Bob didn’t get where he got by being cryptic, he practiced some classic Minnesota virtues such as steady hard work — no writer’s block for Bob — and industrious touring and being on time for gigs and avoiding addictive substances that make you stupid and then dead, and also tolerating jerks, including ones who love you.

He had to work to become iconic — in some of his early recordings he sounds a lot like Ray Benson of Asleep at the Wheel and he had to learn how to sing through his nose so he could be a Bob instead of a Ray and there he is today, a self-invented object of fascination. Minnesotans are not big on fiction though. There probably are people in Hibbing who think, “If Zimmerman had really applied himself, he could’ve become a terrific neurologist.”

As I proceed through my eighties, I go back to a Minnesota point of view: life is complicated, take it one day at a time, the urge to be top dog is not a useful ambition, be grateful for what you have and learn to cherish your portion. As the French would say, “Carpe diem.”

The lust for world domination does not make for the good life. It’s the life of the male raccoon who battles for preeminence and winds up in a ditch being pecked at by crows. It’s not for sensible people. Be at peace, read books, cherish your friends, take walks, love life until the first coronary walks up and slugs you in the chest. Charisma is pure fiction, and so is brilliance. It’s the dummies who sit on the dais, and it’s the smart people who sit in the dark near the exits.

I had to make many mistakes to learn all that and now I’ve saved you the trouble of doing likewise. You’re welcome. God bless.

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My plan for the next four years

Somebody has to be the worst president in U.S. history, they can’t all be No. 14 as Joe Biden was in a survey of American historians or No. 8 like Ike or No. 35 like Nixon, and isn’t it only fair that the worst (No. 45) should be given the opportunity to improve his ranking? Of course it is. Meanwhile, I don’t need to follow his second term day by day; I can better occupy my time with the crossword puzzle and the book reviews and skip the funny pages. I don’t check my IRA every morning or my blood pressure or the WNBA standings or the air quality index, so why should I upset myself at the thought of Kash Patel running the FBI or Tulsi Gabbard as head of national intelligence or an anti-vaxxer as Secretary of Health? If I want to study lunacy, why not become a therapist and get paid for it?

So I am focused on the positive aspects of life. I’ve just succeeded at taking a lazy one-week vacation with my family at a resort in California at which I slept late and hung out beside a pool under an umbrella and sipped lavender lemonade. My work ethic relaxed severely, I was very agreeable the entire time, I even started to sort of like myself.

Once I sat in a hot tub with four people who seemed to be employed in the software trade and listened to their palaver and didn’t understand a single word of it, not even “the” or “a” or “since.” It was very rewarding. None of them asked me what I do for a living so I just sat in bubbling hot water watching the mountains turn pink in the sunset and feeling very lucky not to be influential like Thomas L. Friedman of the Times who returned from a trip to China with a new perspective on world affairs.

Life is good once you master the art of Deletion. Every day my laptop is full of emails asking for money to do worthwhile, even noble, things, which, if I donated to them, I’d soon be living in a cardboard box in a vacant lot, and so I click on “Unsubscribe” and they go away for a while. Instead, I google “What is the prospect of international peace and understanding?” and find that the U.N. thinks it’s inevitable and dalailama.com says it’s based on compassion and foreignpolicy.com thinks the prospects are not good. We didn’t used to have Google, my kiddoes, we used to sit and worry about these things and now at last clear answers are available. Contradictory, but still.

An old man sees progress on so many fronts, such as the advent of the frozen waffle and spreadable butter. I remember the heavy waffle irons of yore, the risk of a small child yanking the contraption down on his head and therefore never getting into grad school, the mixing of dough and prying the roasted waffle off the hot iron and spreading rock-hard butter on it and ripping the delicacy to shreds. Now it’s two minutes from toaster to mouth, no problem.

Advances have been made in packaging: tiny slits enable a person to open a bag of jelly beans or caramel corn without using brute force and perhaps injuring a shoulder and needing shoulder replacement.

As a liberal Democrat, I felt obliged to read about environmental degradation, poor math scores among low-income children, declining respect for governmental institutions, the loss of wildlife species, explosive economic inequity, the advance of AI toward self-replication, nations falling into chaos and refugee populations growing, the fascination of the working class with billionaire leaders who use political power to enrich themselves, and so on and so forth, and now I’ve discovered artificial tears can take the place of reading about crises. A couple squirts in each eye and I feel bad for half a minute and accomplish about as much as I would after reading the Times or the Post.

And so I am avoiding having lunch with Democrats — it’s the same conversation over and over: “Did you read about, etc., etc. I can’t believe it, so on and so forth.” The man will do what he will do. Let John Thune and Mike Johnson agonize over it. I hope he can beat out James Buchanan, ranked as 44th by historians, the man who sat on his hands as the country blundered into the Civil War. It’s a low bar but as long as the South doesn’t delete itself, Trump can do it. And if the South does, well, 39 states is still a lot of states and much more united.

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Texas is a real education

I flew down to Texas last week to get out of my tiny bubble on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and see that this is a big country that includes people who don’t think as I do nor even wish to. And from Texas I took my family to California to be among people who think as I did when I was younger but with uninhibited extravagance. It was quite a trip.

On Election Day, I expected Wonder Woman to win who fights for justice, peace, and equality, and she did not. It goes against what Miss Mortenson taught us in tenth-grade civics class so I went to Texas to try to make sense of it. Miss Mortenson believed in newspapers that tell the truth, the American ideal of the intrepid reporter who can’t be bought, and when I landed in Houston, I saw we’d arrived in the land of Fox — it was on giant screens in airport waiting areas and cafés — the network that coagulated entertainment and news by telling its audience what they wanted to believe and thanks to the Australian Rupert Murdoch, 70% of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen and Biden was illegitimate, and there is the heart of the illness in this country, the willingness to believe what you know is not true in order to think more of yourself and less of other people.

Texas presents stylistic differences, for sure: no adult Minnesota male would walk down a concourse dressed in a cowboy outfit and no self-respecting waitress would addresses a stranger as Darling but here it comes with the job. You see people enjoying a whiskey highball with breakfast. There’s plenty of plastic surgery. One walks around averting one’s eyes. And I shrink at the sight of young women competing at cuteness, 18-year-olds working hard at being 11 or 12, squealing, yelping, yipping.

I got a car service at the airport and the driver filled me in a little. I asked her, “What would a Democrat need to do to win statewide in Texas?” She said, “Become a Republican.” I asked her if Democrats have any hope. She said, “We did until this year and now we’re just scared. Nobody likes Ted Cruz and still he got reelected. When Texas got hit by a winter storm and the power went out and Houston was in the 30s and Cruz flew to Cancún for a holiday, we were sure we could beat him, but no. When people vote for someone they despise, that’s serious.”

The pool at the hotel had a swim-up bar where you could order a grasshopper or a martini. Looking around I saw bulges on men’s hips where they seemed to be carrying hardware under their jackets, perhaps an electric drill or a hammer. And plastic is everywhere, plastic abounds. No recycling bins in sight.

After a few days we flew to California and a mountain resort that offers birdwatching and pottery-making, self-guided meditation, olive oil tastings, and a spa that offers a flower seed scrub and body polishes and an exfoliating experience with a traditional Chumash narrative. There are artists in residence. Chefs create dishes from local growers. There are “impactful group experiences.” At the restaurant, you can order vegan lasagna with roasted root vegetables or lavender lemonade. Lavender grows on the grounds and roses and many varieties of herbs. The resort has a policy of “wildlife acknowledgement,” meaning “do not approach and do not feed.” There is little plastic in evidence and recycling bins everywhere.

Clearly the country has chosen cowboys and highballs over meditation and the country is about to get an education. Thanks to the highly selective teaching of history, I grew up a patriotic optimist before the era of resentful billionaires. The Fords and the Rockefellers were grateful tycoons and endowed foundations to do good things unlike Elon Musk who paid a quarter-billion for the privilege of advising the incoming president. Back in the days of cursive writing and table manners, this was considered Conflict of Interest.

Some of my best friends are earnest progressive Democrats who are passionate about transgender rights and when I tell the joke about the transgender Christmas tree whose pronouns are tree/trim suddenly I become an enema. But I’m troubled to see corruption in broad daylight accepted as normal. We’ve arrived at an oligarchy more brutal than the one Thomas Keillor fled when he sailed from Yorkshire in colonial times. So onward we go. We are about to get the government that Texas voted for.

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Man of the moment thinks back

Time magazine naming Trump “Person of the Year” is an interesting idea, sort of like naming a mortician to be your heir, but there it is. Life has its oddities. These days I’m walking around with a chorus of “Halle, Hallelujah” echoing in my head, from a Christmas song, “Light in the Stable,” I sang with some women the other day. I just sang a bass line, which is like inviting a mortician to your birthday party, but it felt good to me and now the refrain will not — simply refuses to — go away. I need my mind. I use it for various things. I can’t donate it to praising a child in a manger. He’s got cathedrals galore, choirs, gigantic organs, Bible classes.

I have just poured some coffee an inch to the left of my coffee cup and I hold the Hallelujah chorus responsible. Poured it on the kitchen table and it spread under the laptop I am writing on. Thank goodness my beloved was not witness to this. She has noted gaps in my thinking, moments of global aphasia (such as the inability to remember exactly what global aphasia is), a fondness for irrelevance, a tendency to repeat myself, and also. Global aphasia.

People who are employed by me notice that I go up and down stairs very deliberately, holding onto the railing — some might say “clutching” it — and I see them scanning the want ads for employment opportunities in the parking-lot attendant field.

I was a parking-lot attendant when I was 19 and 20 and I remember it well, a five-acre University gravel lot on the west bluff of the Mississippi in Minneapolis, about a hundred yards from the bridge the poet John Berryman jumped off to die in the coal yard below. I remember bitter cold mornings, the wind whistling down the valley from Manitoba, and I, lightly dressed in order to be cool, directing cars to the correct spot, lining them up in double rows.

It was the first time in my life I exercised true authority. I encountered the stubborn independence of the intellectual elite and I bent them to my will with the use of precise hand signals, a commanding shout, and turning a deaf ear to their protests. It worked. My parking lot was commended for its straight even rows. I got a certificate of appreciation but I’ve forgotten where I put it.

I remembered those days last week riding in a cab down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, the city packed with shoppers, the street from 72nd down was a glacier of cars. The subway would’ve taken a few minutes, a taxi took an hour. No New Yorker would’ve made this choice, the cabs were full of yahoos like me. Traffic guys with yellow gloves waved at cars jammed in solid.

And then, walking west on 43rd Street to find Town Hall, I remembered when I was in my mid-twenties and submitted stories to The New Yorker magazine, which was just east of Sixth Avenue. Every young writer in America knew the address by heart: 25 West 43rd. In 1969, a Barnard grad named Mary D. Kierstead was in charge of the “slush pile,” the unsolicited submissions, and from this mountain she chose a story of mine and sent it up to an editor and told him to read it and he did and accepted it and ever since I have believed in angels.

With the prestigious name of The New Yorker to drop, I snuck into public radio though I was no journalist and knew nothing about classical music and I launched a Saturday night show completely unfitted for public radio, which lasted forty years and thank you, Lord, for your mercy. It gave me more fun than an old evangelical could expect, hanging around musicians, a very congenial lot, and also earned some money.

Angels perform acts of kindness that turn out to have enormous consequences. I’ve looked at the story she picked off the slush pile and don’t see anything remarkable about it, perhaps she was just having a good day. She died four years ago at the age of 96. I think I met her once at a party at the Angells’, speaking of angels. She was wearing red glasses. Life is beautiful, the precariousness of it. What if she’d called in sick that day and her place was taken by some old grumblebutt has-been named Bob and I’d be a retired parker of cars parked in a rest home, reminiscing about notable blizzards and downpours.

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A quiet night in Manhattan

My wife and I like to sit in the same room at night, doing our separate things, she in a chair reading a book, I at a table addressing Christmas cards. The book is by a mentally ill mountain climber worried that in an avalanche he might lose his meds for bipolarity. It’s a snowy Christmas card, I’m signing our names under a poem that ends “Onward we go, faithfully, into the dark and are there angels hovering overhead? Hark.” She is sleepy but it’s a good book and the bipolar guy is at a Buddhist camp where you meditate ten hours a day and his job is to sweep the floor with a broom made from branches. I’ve done a mountain of cards and I’m still in the K’s, Katherine, Ken, Kristina, and I’m not thinking about angels, I’m thinking what if Elon Musk sells himself the U.S. Postal Service for $125 million, half of what he paid for the Republican Party, and of course it goes online and merges with X and you’ll speak the inscription to be written cursively in your distinctive style. The p.o. is gone and polio and smallpox return and the F.B.I.J. investigates journalists and it all happens without anybody commenting on it and a second-grader calls 911 to report an active shooter in the next classroom of a Christian school.

It’s at times like this I think maybe I should see a neurologist. Then remember I saw Dr. Fink two weeks ago and he said my eyes are focused somewhat apart, not together, and the cardiologist said arrhythmia might be causing the dizziness, and the eyelid guy said he didn’t think surgery would help. He was the first left-handed physician I’ve seen in ages and I was fascinated by it. My handwriting is big and bold, using a black Sharpie, and I write “Blessings!” under the “Hark” to indicate that I mean it, it is a blessing despite the cash flowing into Bezos’s coffers, people crave Christmas. Normal folks, crazy ones, kooks, awake in the night and hear spooks, and look for a light, a star shining bright, a family in the Gospel of Luke’s.

I was in a big crowd a week ago in St. Paul, not in a church, a big crowd of people in off the street and someone started singing Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright, and they all sang. No piano, just a crowd singing. Three verses, the holy Infant, the quaking shepherds, the whole megillah. I’ll bet you most of them hadn’t darkened a pew in years. But in this crazy culture of ours in which your phone blinks and you get the latest details on the school shooting (“President calls incident “unconscionable”) and you google Wisconsin to remind yourself where it is and for some reason Bing Crosby is singing and the fact you know it’s him tells you that you’re Old so you click on Back and here are very nice people lined up to buy McWaffles and become joyful and again Back and Stan and Ollie dressed as cowboys are dancing in each other’s arms. In the midst of all this, plus the return of locker-room talk to government (“absurd,” “stupid,” “worst president in history”), people do long for beauty, for reverence, the sacred. I felt it in that big room in St. Paul. Enough with the catcalls and the spitballs, let’s try bowing our heads and all singing in the same key.

My love was sleepy but she was somewhere in Nepal with the guy climbing Everest without oxygen and I was doing Pamela, Patricia, Peter, writing Blessings! And Blessings!And Blessings! I love this quiet night together, reading and writing. We live in a building that went up the year of the Great Crash. The lobby is grand but plenty of the folks who moved in could barely pay the rent. Some of these cards will go to elderly friends, some in Rehab though how much Rehabbing is possible in your mid-80s, I don’t know. Maybe the dizziness is part of the game, the result of a lifelong aversion to exercise. I chose this life and at the end I must pay the bill: that’s what we puritans believe. I prefer the term “lightheadedness,” a head filled with light. I go to bed next to the woman I love, I scratch her back, I remember that crowd in St. Paul. I feel calm if not too bright.

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The sweet day draws near

I did a Christmas show last week in St. Paul that ended with the audience singing “Silent Night,” three verses, a cappella, the infant tender and mild, the quaking shepherds, the radiant beams, and minutes later who should come backstage but my cousin Phyllis and her family, which made me happy. Her mother was my aunt Jean, who was funny and had a big heart and who, when I was a toddler and Dad went into the Army, took my mother and her three little kids into her big house in St. Paul and I still remember how welcome we were. There was a chair at the table that I guarded and if anyone tried to sit in it, I said “Daddy’s chair” and waved them away.

I go back home now and then and people walk up to me in the Hotel St. Paul who remember me as a friendly radio voice and some of them were apparently quite attached to that voice — I met a young woman last week who gasped as if I were a ghost and said, “We listened to you every Saturday at five o’clock. I still miss you.”

I’d feel that way if I ran into A.J. Liebling; I’d be stunned and tell him how I loved his writing when I was in the eighth grade at Anoka High School, read The Sweet Scienceand The Road Back to Paris, but he’s been dead since 1963.

I miss St. Paul, which is still my home but not because I’m admired there. I love it for the same reason my wife loves New York. She came here from Minnesota as a teenager to study violin and become a musician and so she went through hard times, experienced poverty, stayed true to her vocation and when she got the blues, she found relief by taking long walks around Manhattan. She was proud and never asked for help and that makes Manhattan her true home, the place where she gained independence.

I did my hard times in St. Paul, was broke there, lived for years with no savings or insurance, once had to live in my in-laws’ basement for three months, pure humiliation though Marge and Gene were hugely hospitable. I got fired in St. Paul twice. But I survived and bought my first house on Goodrich Avenue in 1982 for $80,000.

I like living in Manhattan, I love the fact that my wife loves Manhattan, I like being a pedestrian, an invisible nobody. I take my solemn face around the town and experience the here of the here and the there of the there without ever needing to impersonate myself. I go forward for Communion at St. Michael’s and am just one more sheep. I’m a perpetual tourist here because I had money when I came here and never had to struggle. I am in awe of Jenny’s dedication: her beloved grandparents lived in New Jersey, they were well-to-do, she never asked them for help.

The happiest Christmas I remember was the year after we married and we put on a big Christmas Eve dinner for a bunch of her freelance musician friends. We made a feast and they were delighted, it was a long evening of hilarity and loose talk and merriment, and I didn’t know them but I felt honored by their friendship.

And looking back to that marvelous night, I see it was due to their having known poverty. A person will enjoy a feast more if you’ve experienced living on the edge. There is a dullness that comes with the comfortable life. My parents grew up in the Depression and strove to give us a life free from want and now I think I was drawn to the literary life by a craving for danger. I was fired when I was 25 and set out to be a writer and wound up in Marge and Gene’s basement.

And now I worry, as old people do, about the kids I see who are growing up in the dreadful clutter of American life, the gizmos and social media bullying, and can they find delight as I did in skating on the frozen Mississippi and discovering Liebling and Jenny found listening to Prokofiev and Brahms. I pray for our kids to be lighthearted. The darkness is out there, and Christmas becomes utterly beautiful, the circle of love and friendship, the lighted candles, the anticipation of the child, the radiant beams, the redeeming grace.

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It can get really cold in Minnesota

I flew back to Minnesota just in time for a classic hard Minnesota freeze like the ones of my childhood, when you walk out the door and the cold hits you like a board and suddenly you realize you’re wearing the wrong clothes. You chose these clothes for elegance to emphasize your slim figure. The right clothes would make you look like you weigh 300 pounds. You wish you had those clothes on now.

St. Paul is bleak. I walk out of the Hotel St. Paul and wait for my Uber ride to the Midway Saloon. I feel I’m at a concentration camp for political dissidents. The wind blows in off the Mississippi. Nobody is out for a walk, nobody is hanging out, everyone is heading briskly for a car or for a warm building. And there is no complaining. This is the remarkable thing. Nobody says, “My God, it’s cold out, I have no feeling in my face,” because (1) this is not a personal experience, everyone else is cold too and (2) God is aware of the cold and is hoping it will make you a better person, which God knows it should. Nobody says, “I wish I were in Florida,” because (1) you are not in Florida and (2) there is a reason for you to be in Minnesota, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. You’d be in Phoenix with all the retired cops and teachers and ministers.

I’m here because my friend Pat Donohue asked me to come do a gig with him at the Midway Saloon and how could I say no? I’m 82, I’m a performer, and thanks to my evangelical upbringing, I’ve never performed in a bar where people drink beer and whiskey. I did a show at a winery once but that’s different. This is a neighborhood bar where everybody seems to know everybody. The pool table is up front, the stage is in the back. I’ve spent a good deal of my life in high-end venues, the ones with ushers and dressing rooms and a stage manager and a Steinway piano and it seems right, at the end of my career, to get back to basics and do two sets on a stage next to the men’s room on a profoundly cold night in St. Paul.

Pat’s a guitarist I’ve known for years and Richard Kriehn plays mandolin and I do a couple songs I remember from childhood, the ballad of the babes in the woods who froze to death in a blizzard and the ballad of Frankie and Johnny, the crowd singing the refrain “He was her man and he was doing her wrong.” It is a very warm crowd, packed in tight in chairs, around tables, standing in the corner, and thanks to the cruel wind outdoors, they are all very happy to be here, which is not always true of an audience in, say, West Palm Beach or Honolulu. The cold has drawn us together as mammals. They know that I used to live here and then moved to New York, but they’re in a forgiving mood because here I am suffering with them. Someone asks if I know Bob Dylan. I don’t. I used to sing his song “Mozambique” but can’t remember the words. I sing a Van Morrison song, “Oh won’t you stay? Stay a while with your own ones. Don’t ever stray. Stray so far from your own ones. For this world is so cold, don’t care nothing for your soul you share with your own ones.”

And in a little bar on a bitterly cold night in St. Paul, I feel the full weight of those words. The crowd was in a singing mood so we did some Everlys, some Beatles, “Honky Tonk Women,” but I felt like singing a gospel song about the river Jordan: “Now look at that cold Jordan, look at the deep waters.”

I was young and unemployed in this town at one time. I had to live in my parents’ basement at one time. I went to several funerals in this town that broke my heart. I sat in dark bedrooms and wrote on a typewriter here with no expectation I’d get published. I got fired here twice. So this is my home. I’m a visitor in New York, always will be. I never had it rough there. I need to come back here and be with my people and sing with them on a really cold night.

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