Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 9

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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Moving on to the next thing

A guy whom we Christians think about every Christmas is John the Baptist, who announced, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord,” but when people came from Jerusalem to hear him preach and to be baptized, he called them a “generation of vipers,” not a welcoming thing to say, and because he wore rags, had a long beard, and fed on locusts, he’s not celebrated at Advent. He was too adventurous. We don’t serve locusts for Christmas dinner, not even in a pie or as seasoning on turkey, so poor John is cast aside, even by Baptists, and we focus instead on shepherds and angels, who are kindly and better dressed.

Seeing how much attention irrelevant elves and snowmen and reindeer get at the holidays, you’d think the mystic who announced the forthcoming miracle could at least get an ornament on a tree, but this is how a consumer society deals with mystics. We want them to have nice hair and speak softly and not eat insects.

Another guy left out is Joe, the dad who traveled afoot while Mary rode the donkey and who surely deserves some credit for the virginity of his betrothed, but no, he’s only a bystander like the sheep and the cattle. I’m not saying he should be worshipped but how about respected?

I was a failure as a mystic and chose comedy instead, which is the opposite of mysticism, and I wasn’t a good father or husband, and I contemplate this on Sunday sitting in my pew, but we Episcos don’t belabor confession, we don’t take cold showers or whip ourselves or sleep on a hard floor, we just say the prayer of contrition and are absolved and then we shake hands with each other and go on to Communion. I like this about Anglicanism, the briskness. Don’t devote yourself to remorse. Repent and move on.

My father was a bystander at Christmas, observing, waiting for the next event. The gifts I got from him had my mother’s fingerprints all over them and were beautifully wrapped by her; my dad was a carpenter, not a gift wrapper.

My problem with the holiday is the gift-giving. For children, okay, but grown-ups? I don’t think so. Poor people? Sure. Clothing and groceries, the necessities, but most Americans have much too much stuff already and need to discard. I get email ads for T-shirts with humorous sayings and I delete them and delete the ads for candy and pens and cookware and books. I look at my bookshelves and see dozens of books I’ve been meaning to read, P.G. Wodehouse, The Oxford Book of English Verse, Dante’s Inferno.

It made me feel awful, the sight of books I’ve neglected, and so I put on a coat and took a walk down Columbus Avenue and felt better immediately. I grew up among overly remorseful people and New Yorkers aren’t that type. They walk ahead boldly, not looking back. They don’t say, “Oh, excuse me, I’m sorry” every time they walk near someone.

Thanks to the ubiquitous iPhone, I go for a walk and listen to other people’s conversations, and New Yorkers talk loud. A woman says, “We’re going to Phoenix for Christmas. Steve’s sister’s there, she’s the one who thought she was nonbinary and then she met this guy—” and then the light changed and she crossed and I kept going straight.

I went to a two-chair barbershop for a haircut. I’ve gone to stylists for years but felt like being barbered for a change so I walked in. It made me feel young, the paper tissue around the neck, the spritzing of the hair, the razor, the snipping. The barber was foreign, perhaps Middle Eastern, and had asked me something at the start and I said yes and now as he was busy trimming, I realized I’d agreed to have my hair cut short.

I put on my glasses and looked in the mirror and saw a guy from the early Fifties. No mystic there at all. I looked more like a geometry teacher. He charged me $40 and I tipped him $25, it felt that good to be shorn. I’ve had enough of styling and just want a haircut. The Lord cometh and the valleys shall be exalted and I am lost in the hills. Lord, do for me what you did for the Wise Men from afar. Show me a star.

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The perils of pedestrianism explained

It’s been a couple months since the New York City Council legalized jaywalking in town and nobody has noticed this because everybody was doing it anyway. New Yorkers have been jaywalking since before there were stoplights. No New Yorker would stand on the sidewalk, no traffic in sight, and wait for the Walk sign. Nobody, not even Baptists or accountants or people suffering from severe clinical anxiety. Only tourists from the Great Plains would stand and wait for the light to change and this is a clue to pickpockets to lift their wallets.

The main hazard to pedestrians in the city is bicyclists who jayride wildly, flying down the bike lanes, whizzing through red lights, bikes and scooters whipping silently through the winter dark, riders dressed in black, like vampires, riding the wrong way on a one-way street, and especially treacherous are the delivery bikes. New York cops ride around in squad cars and during rush hour a squad car has zero chance of catching a speeding outlaw bicyclist racing through the three-foot gap between parked cars and cars stuck in traffic.

Eating in became popular during the pandemic — ordering food online from a restaurant to be delivered and eating at home. Many people who work from home also eat in — an invisible population that only ventures outdoors when they need to see their ophthalmologist or have a tooth filled — pale stiff-legged people who are uneasy in a crowd and wear masks and avoid eye contact. New Yorkers, of course, expect prompt service, even ordering exotic Thai and Indian dishes with special instructions as to spice and sauce and whether broiled or steamed — they phone in the order and expect it to be at their door on the 15th floor, delivered by Carlos the doorman, within 20 minutes or else they’ll call the Mughlai Temple Café and threaten legal action.

And so you have men on bikes racing through narrow gaps on jammed avenues with a backpack full of shrimp curry and pad thai, meanwhile an elderly man (me) on his way to the drugstore to pick up some Alka-Seltzer stands on the curb, peering into the darkness for some glimmer of light, some sign of motion, some clue as to approaching bicycles. This is the adventure of life in Manhattan, serious bodily injury from bicyclists delivering exotic food at high speed to stay-at-home software programmers.

This is why I pay extra to live in a doorman building. Felipe will deal with the guy on the bike, accept the charred wok vegetable medley and the crispy calamari and drunken noodles with peanut sauce and hand the bag to Lenny, who will bring it up to the 12th floor and leave it at our door and the food will still be hot though the restaurant is a mile away. This is a remarkable amenity. It’s not the cold weather that keeps my sweetie and me indoors, it isn’t the fear of stickups, it’s the fear of being run down by bicyclemen delivering food to other people. The fear of lying in the street while covered with garlic sauce.

Nonetheless, I like New York. I’m glad to be done with lawn mowing and snow shoveling. We live two blocks from the subway where the downtown train will take me to the main library or Lincoln Center or lunch in the Village.

And then there are the little human contacts that make your day, like my visit to the walk-in clinic on Columbus Avenue to have a plastic pad that had become detached from my hearing aid removed from where it was stuck deep in my ear canal. Not a critical problem but you can’t just walk up to someone on the street and say, “Could you take a pencil and get something out of my ear?”

So I sat in the waiting room and was called in to be examined and met a doctor who was (I could tell) slightly amused at the problem. The pad was way in deep, thanks to my trying to dig it out with my finger. I said to her, “You’re a little overeducated for this but where else could I go?” She laughed. She had a nurse hold a light and she reached in with tiny forceps and extracted it. She was from Seattle, had lived in New York for twenty years, and liked it. So do I. No matter what your problem, there’s someone in this city who can deal with it. You just need to watch out for bikes.

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The small holiday of a happy man

The Christmas season is a trial for us Christians who must wend our way down miles of aisles of trashy merch as musical garbage drizzles down from the speakers in the ceiling and try to keep the nativity of Our Lord in mind, no easy thing, and for this I blame Charles Dickens who took a holy occasion and hung tinsel on it. His message of cheerfulness and sharing in the face of selfish greed is all well and good but it’s not the same as the story of God come to Earth to be made man to show His love for us. One is neighborliness and the other is a miracle and a mystery.

I also blame Irving Berlin and the composers of “Jingle Bells” and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and all the other standards that become termites in the brain. I hear them in the grocery store and I ask myself, “Are there no workhouses? As Scrooge said, “Are there no prisons? Are they still operating? If I had my way, everyone who goes around humming ‘White Christmas’ should be baked with his own pudding until he turns brown and be buried with a sprig of holly through his heart.”

As for Dickens’s story made into a play, it’s been awfully generous to hundreds of American theaters, a sort of National Endowment of Dickens, millions of people paying hard cash to sit down and see the wretched capitalist in his countinghouse, the visit by his cheery nephew Fred on Christmas Eve, the visit by the charity fundraisers, the departure of the clerk Bob Cratchit, the Scrooge supper, and then the sound of chains as the ghost of Marley appears, dragging his cashboxes behind him, to announce the visitations by the three spirits.

This play is what enables theaters to put on Othello and Hedda Gabler and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Which surely is a good thing and provides employment to men and women who may not be cut out to be ophthalmologists so you don’t have someone saying, “Look at my right ear” as he shines a bright light in your eye who would much rather be saying, “To be or not to be, that is the question.” Anything that keeps incompetent people out of the field of medicine is a good thing, and not humbug.

But the shepherds tending their flocks by night in Judea who were summoned by the angel to go to Bethlehem to see the wondrous thing did not go to find jolly people around a Christmas tree with nice gifts and a turkey dinner with a fine wine and rice pudding. They went to confront a miracle that every Christian must believe or not believe or sort of believe or some combination of the three for your entire life, the idea that the Creator had a Son who was made incarnate and grew up Jewish only to be crucified as a fake Messiah. It’s not about snow.

I grew up among Christian literalists who were wary of the Dickens Christmas and felt that the gift-giving was a sentimental notion powered by gift sellers that misrepresented the whole deal — as if the stable were a mall and the shepherds had come to shop for ties and hankies — but my mother grew up with that Christmas so it prevailed in our home and I went along with it for decades, and then, after a Christmas spent with a very pregnant wife sort of clarified the idea of Advent, we’ve come to love the quiet Christmas. I do four Christmas shows this year and at each one the audience will stand in a darkened theater and sing, a cappella, about the silent night calm and bright, and the sound of a thousand people singing from memory and in harmony about the Holy Infant, the quaking shepherds, the radiant beams, this is Christmas enough for the old man.

I would think better of the incoming emperor if I thought he knew the words to “Silent Night” or the Nicene Creed or the Lord’s Prayer or if he found comfort and joy sitting in a pew among other believers and seekers, but of course that’s not my business. It is none the less a blessed time of year as I hike to church and if indeed God became one of us in Bethlehem then a great weight is lifted. Ignore the dark, wait for the light.

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Walking to church on a cold day

We had a couple of summery days in November in New York but now, thank goodness, summer is over and we can get back to business. Thanksgiving is done and we spent it with talkative friends and since I was brought up to believe it’s impolite to interrupt, I sat through a two-hour dinner saying nothing but “Uh-huh” and “Oh, really.” And on Sunday I stepped out into a bitter cold wind and walked to church. It felt good.

Summer is too perfect, the dreaminess of it, like an all-Debussy festival, you long for some interesting weather, possibly a tornado. It makes me question the idea of heaven as eternal bliss, which comes from desert tribes who didn’t know about ice and snow.

All my vacations in Florida I was glad to see come to an end, especially the ones on the Gulf Coast where your motel room is likely to look out on a strip mall and a six-lane freeway. The Jews go to the east coast of Florida, the ocean side, and a person should follow the Jews: do not vacation in Egypt, you’re not going to like it.

I assume that we Episcopalians will go to heaven — we are very very nice people and not the sort you can imagine God hurling into the lake of fire — but what little we know about heaven from Scripture, the praising and rejoicing, doesn’t sound like something I care to do endlessly. For years, okay, but after half a million years it’d be heavenly to have a day of complaint and lamentation. My Unitarian friends will refuse to go to heaven because it discriminates against atheists. And heaven is authoritarian and Unitarians would demand to have seats on the planning committee. I’ll miss them.

Walking to church on December 1st, against a cold wind, made me very grateful to get there, walk into the warm sanctuary, have a cup of coffee, shake hands with people. And up front hung the Advent wreath waiting for the first candle to be lit.

Christmas changed for me 27 years ago. It got small. My mother loved the holiday and we had the tree and stockings and piles of gifts and the big dinner, and I did my best to keep up the tradition after I left home. For a few years I spent Christmases in Copenhagen where Christmas is a monthlong festival with obligatory traditions galore. My Danish friends didn’t necessarily believe in sanctification by faith but they believed in singing all the carols around an enormous tree elaborately decorated and then opening piles of gifts properly wrapped and not merely with adhesive tape but also with ribbon tied into bows, followed by a dinner of roast goose, red cabbage and rice pudding, followed by serious drinking.

But in1997, as Christmas approached, my wife was nine months pregnant and we sat in our New York apartment with no need of tree or gifts or goose. The anticipation was everything. We lit a candle and waited day after day and on the 29th the holy child arrived and the obstetrical nurse handed her to me, her arms waving, her legs dancing, and the crappy songs vanished, the stores full of junk, the Christmas tree lots, the glittery lights, and it’s been a beautiful simple holiday ever since.

I don’t come to church Sunday morning as a saint, I come to contemplate my messy life and the time I’ve wasted and friends I’ve abandoned, but on this Sunday morning the deacon read from Luke’s Gospel loud and clear, “Be on guard that your hearts are not weighted down with the worries of this life” — Astonishing! A command to lightheartedness! — the opposite of what unbelievers believe church is all about.

On the way out, I stop to congratulate the deacon for reading Luke in a big bold voice, and she says, “I love the Word.” And now I do too.

Be on guard. Enjoy the simple pleasures, prayer, the benediction, the rousing Bach postlude, the handshakes, and the luxury of the warm taxi ride home, the embrace of my love who meets me at the door, the fresh coffee, and a sugary doughnut. We live in troubled times but perhaps there needs to be a time-out from trouble and maybe I’ll make it Sunday. Put the worries of this life aside.

We light the wreath of Advent,

A season whose coming is meant

To lighten the spirit

Of those who come near it

And make us reasonably content.

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So what are we to do now?

The great George Will has passed the fifty-mile mark as a newspaper columnist, and all the rest of us in the trade admire the fact that he still enjoys doing it. It’s palpable in his work. Anybody can throw spitballs but Mr. Will loves the American language and the construction of sentences and paragraphs. This, rather than his correctitude, is what makes him worth reading. It’s a pleasure.

I enjoy the New York Times and I love it all the more now that I see it has practically no power at all. When I took Professor Hage’s Journalism 101 course, back when Kennedy was president and I was a parking lot attendant and a fan of Pete Seeger, I imagined that the great and mighty picked up the Times with fear and foreboding, and I went into journalism for the thrill of being a nerd in horn-rimmed glasses who could bring down the powerful. I got a job writing obituaries at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and after six months on the burial detail, I left quietly.

And now, despite journalism, the American people have elected to high office a conman and fabulist who dismisses the Times as fish wrap and he has proposed people for Cabinet positions whom you wouldn’t want on your co-op board, whose résumés set off shrill alarms, and it’s clear that the man is using his appointments to express his contempt for government, same as if a man who hates baseball bought the Yankees and hired a coaching staff of soccer moms. The Times wields less power than the rector of the president-elect’s church if he attended church, which he does not.

But the Times photo desk, bless their hearts, is enjoying the game of choosing unflattering photographs of the Cabinet nominees. The Defense Secretary is wearing a drugstore tie and too much hair product and looks as though he’s pleading innocent to a charge of public urination. The Attorney General looks like a Florida blonde who hostesses at a steakhouse and comedy club. The Secretary of State’s pants are bunched up in the crotch and his paunch is prominent and he’s telling his wife, “I’ve been waiting here for half an hour just like you told me to.” The Surgeon General is wearing a billowy red dress she bought at 70% off list price and there are food stains on her bosom. The Treasury Secretary seems to be saying, “That’s not my linguini. I ordered the one with clam sauce.”

These are not the pictures their mothers would put in a nice silver frame and place on the piano. Each of us has been photographed in moments when we did not look impressive or even mentally stable, and we dispose of these pictures insofar as they come into our possession. The Times photo desk enjoys displaying them for the amusement of readers. You sit down to your bran flakes and here’s a photograph of the president-elect that tells you (1) he thinks he’s incredibly handsome and his hair is a work of art and (2) he hasn’t learned how to do makeup.

It’s the only real power the press has, the ability to irritate. The great man talks about his very high IQ and never needing Viagra and the press quotes him and it doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t. His outrageousness dulls the mind of the body politic and we go into WHATEVER mode. Elon Musk, a man whose companies have $15 billion in contracts with the federal government, is put in charge of cutting government spending? Whatever.

You and I have approximately nothing to say about this and that’s the benefit of being a loser. The people who are celebrating now are on the hook and you and I may as well join a choir or read Great Books. The time you would’ve spent reading stories that make you draw on your reserves of profanity would be better spent practicing kindness and doing your part to keep American humor alive by telling jokes. People used to do this.

The Congressman went to church on Sunday and took a seat in a pew next to a hefty woman and when they stood for the opening hymn, he noticed that her dress was caught in her crack so he reached over and pulled it out. She glared at him so he figured she wanted it back in and when he did, she slapped him hard and said, “I wouldn’t vote for you if you were St. Peter himself.” He said, “Ma’am, if I were St. Peter, you wouldn’t be in my district.”

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Walking home from Sunday church

My mother, Grace, and her sister Elsie were lifelong best friends, two adjacent younger girls in a family of 13, and our two families had Thanksgiving together every year, usually at Elsie’s house because she was the better cook, a perfectionist, whereas Mother had six kids, four of us boys, which didn’t encourage perfection. Mostly, she served chow.

We were quiet devout people, the women exemplified mannerliness and motherhood, the men were taciturn and could quote Scripture, nobody smoked or drank or swore, the baby napped on a bed among the coats, and the afternoon proceeded along two tracks, heading for a collision: the dinner on one track, Packers-Lions game on the other.

Uncle Don was a Packer fan, from Wausau, and had played guard in the days of the single-wing offense. He was a big man with a big bark and he got intensely involved emotionally with the game. My dad never played football and thought that fanhood was childish, perhaps even unchristian. Don’s two boys and my three brothers and I sat on the couch or on the floor, Dad sat in an armchair, and Don got up close to the screen where he could yell at it. My Dad looked at a book, any book, to avoid seeing a grown man yelling at an appliance, “That was holding! You didn’t see that? Open your eyes, ref! He had both arms around him. He was tackling him and the guy didn’t even have the ball!” And we boys watched this seminar on the meaning of masculinity, as the women coaxed the dinner toward the goal line.

Lavish aromas, six well-behaved boys, my absentee father, and Uncle Don living and dying with the Packers, sometimes moving laterally with the play. He simply could not contain himself. All my other uncles — I had a dozen of them — were soft-spoken men who avoided showing strong emotion, and here was Don — in his heart, he was on the bench, suited up, ready to go in and bash heads.

But when dinner was ready, it was brought to the long table and we were summoned. Don turned the sound down and took his place at the head of the table and said a prayer thanking God for His goodness and mercy and for sending us a Savior, but even when praying he was listening to the announcer in the next room. It was a gorgeous feast: sage stuffing in the great bird’s carcass, baked yams, baked rolls, cranberries, and Don dashing into the living room to yell, “Ya gotta be kidding! How can you pass on third and two??”

Christmas is complicated, sometimes treacherous, involving gift-giving and therefore guilt and matters of taste, but Thanksgiving is a peasant holiday, and good taste plays no part in it, you simply come to the table. Elsie’s feast was, of course, the dinner of all dinners, generous, comfortable, the giblet gravy, the cranberry mold, and Elsie hovering overhead, coaxing, replenishing the platters, apologizing for the food though it was perfect, the mashed potatoes that somehow fell short of their potential, the stuffing what was overcooked (but it was not). My poor father sat in silence, unable to converse with women or children, he loathed football, he wanted to talk about exodus, mainly his own.

The sun set, the table was cleared. A period of lethargy followed, a few rounds of Rook or Flinch, and then we attacked the pies. The holiday dwindled, the baby cried. The leftovers were wrapped and apportioned, the little kids were bundled up, the long goodbyes were said, in the kitchen, and in the driveway, and through the open car windows.

There was much more to Don than football. That’s why you should stick close to family, so you can come to appreciate them. He was a serious student of the Bible. He became a good preacher. When Elsie lay dying, he kept her home and took care of her right up to the end. He told me: “Of course I took care of her. I didn’t hire someone to come in and do it. I loved her.”

In church this past Sunday, we sang “Now thank we all our God,” and I walked home, a freezing wind whipping through the city canyons, thinking of loved ones far away. Life is good, thank You for this. The country has elevated a cruel and corrupt man to power and now we shall see what good our Constitution is and what sort of senators and judges we have. God bless us. More we do not need.

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What’s on my mind, sitting here

It’s the hunting season and also the mating season for deer, a cruel combination — you’re excited by the scent of a female, she turns her beautiful brown eyes your way and your heart pounds and you paw the ground and snort and wave your antlers and then you smell beer and turn and a guy in a red plaid jacket blows your brains out. I never hunted because my dad and uncles weren’t hunters so there was nobody to show me how to do it.

Hunting is hereditary and I’m astonished that a half-million hunting licenses are issued annually in Minnesota and I don’t know any hunters: it means that I’m an outsider, an oddball.

Men hunt for the same reason they fish, in order to escape the company of women. Minnesota is a state of thousands of lakes and each one gives men an opportunity for refuge, sitting in a rowboat or a fishing shack out on the ice where nobody will say, “When are you going to clean out the garage?” Or “You keep talking about going to teacher conferences at the kids’ school but when is this going to happen if ever?” or “Why do you insist on dribbling coffee down the front of the kitchen cabinet and not wiping it up?”

Not many women fish because they know they can buy excellent salmon, tuna, or halibut for a tiny fraction of the cost of a boat and motor and trailer and a pickup to tow it. Ever compare salmon and northern pike? God created pike for cat food.

I’ve been a member of various minorities in my life, having grown up fundamentalist among people who didn’t drink or dance or go to movies or use the Lord’s name in vain, and in college I joined a microscopic minority of people who write limericks.

Minneapolis is great. Have you seen it?

The streets go from Aldrich to Zenith.

It’s the birthplace of Prince,

Than whom no one since

Has been any hipper, I mean it.

The city is good for the sickly.

The streets are numerical, strictly,

And alphabetical

All so that medical

Teams can get to you quickly.

I am in the minority of Americans who read newspapers that subscribe to a code of objectivity. Our number is shrinking, and I can imagine the day when readers give up curiosity in favor of self-affirmation. I don’t wish to see that day and so I’m grateful to be in the minority of octogenarian Americans. We are out of touch and don’t know who the contemporary celebrities are, which one discovers is a loss one can easily live with. It gives you more room to focus on the natural world, birds, trees, little kids, the sun and stars.

I am one of the million-and-a-half Episcopalians in America, whose membership has been declining for years. We don’t know why but we don’t spend much time worrying about it either.

I don’t go to church because I’m a good person. I’m not, and I know that because I don’t hunt or fish so I spend more time around women and women are quite aware of human failings and when they give you a righteous glance, you can feel it. No, I only know how to imitate goodness, and when I sit in church and say the prayers and sing the hymns and listen to Scripture, it takes me out of the world and into the universe. And I feel united to the people around me, young, old, men, women, Black, white, all of us fragile, mortal, heading in the same direction.

My friends assembled to carry

Me to the town cemetery,

A gust of wind blew,

And the ashes all flew,

Leaving nothing of Gary to bury.

My memory was kept

By the sexton who swept

Up the dust. God heal

My soul. He is real

And now I am imaginary.

I wrote it in church during the sermon, which, God forgive me, lost me on a sharp turn, but when I look to my right, I see the chapel where, 29 years ago this week, I held my lover Jenny’s hands and we made our vows. I’m an old man in love and, independent though we be, we are a happy couple. I pray for you and yours. Be kind to others. Don’t be like the fellow of Bellingham so stubborn that there was no telling him. His wife said, “My dear, I wish you weren’t here.” He ignored her and she wound up selling him.

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Thank you for reading this

Man has almost unlimited power to do damage and cause suffering, as we have been learning lately, and some slight power to do good, but as we grow up and pay attention to our surroundings, we see that we are beneficiaries of great gifts for which we can claim no credit, and so we have a day of thanksgiving in November, just as we’re bracing for winter. My aunt Eleanor was the patron saint of Thanksgiving and rented a nearby Legion hall and organized a dinner for a hundred or more Keillors back when I was a kid, before cellphones, so instead of taking selfies we had conversation.

My aunts told stories about the farm and how Grandpa drove a horse-drawn mower to cut hay with the reins in one hand and a book in the other and the day the house burned down and he raked through the ashes looking for photographs and how he drove home with his first Model T Ford and lost control of the car and pulled back on the wheel yelling “Whoa!” as the car slid into the ditch and he sat in it laughing at himself.

I am thankful for those big reunions and for my aunt’s friendship. I live in New York now and have a 1920 photograph on the wall of Grandpa walking down the road with my ten-year-old dad on one side and tiny Eleanor on the other. I am grateful for my first-grade teacher, Estelle Shaver, who kept me after school to reach aloud to her as she corrected workbooks. It was remedial reading but she made it seem like a privilege and I’ve felt privileged ever since.

For generations, women had the easy work of Thanksgiving, which was cooking the meal, and men had the hard job of making conversation. They sat in the living room with a football game on the TV, exchanging monosyllables after a fumble or a touchdown, as familiar smells drifted out of the kitchen where women told family secrets too shocking for men to handle. I’m okay with that.

I sit and stare at the screen watching men crash into each other and I’m grateful for cowardice: I never played football so now I don’t have the aches and pains that my heroic classmates have. I fooled around with drugs in college but they were cheap crummy drugs, not the powerful chemicals of today that lead a person to make a life sleeping in the park. I’m grateful that I was born late enough so that when I developed mitral valve problems, open-heart surgery was rather common so I didn’t die in my late 50s as two of my uncles did.

And I never was cursed with the sense of my own giftedness. People told me I was but I knew better. I have successfully avoided literary awards so I am not oppressed by my own eminence. Every morning I feel like a beginner.

So many blessings, and I haven’t even mentioned friendship, sunsets, public transportation, Christian hymnody, anti-seizure meds, other people’s toddlers, baseball, hearing aids, the steady thoughtful leadership of my wife, fluoridation, the Dairy Queen Heath Bar Blizzard, dental floss, my duet partner Heather Masse, the psalms of David, drip-grind coffee, cats, YouTube, trees, parks, rivers, the prairie, sonnets, Google, and cranberries.

Cranberries are the heart of Thanksgiving dinner. You don’t want a gourmet dinner that distracts you from your life blessings, so you serve turkey, a profoundly average dish. Every turkey dinner is about as good as any other turkey dinner. Same with pumpkin pie. But cranberries are terribly exciting. They are the Robert Frost of fruits, the Flaubert, the Frank Lloyd Wright, the Gabriel Fauré. You can overcook the turkey and serve a pumpkin pie that is just pudding with a crust, but if you serve cranberries you’re okay.

Be happy, my dears. America will soon see the return of the dopiest president in our history. Anyone who nominates Matt Gaetz to be Attorney General and Bobby Kennedy Jr. to be Secretary of Health needs GPS to show him the way to the bathroom, but keep this in mind: many of America’s cranberry growers voted for him and many people whose cranberry sauce has the power to make you stand on your tiptoes and yodel. Think about that for a moment. There is some good in all of us, maybe more than we know. And be happy on Thanksgiving.

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One last word about the election

Every morning when I wake up, I ask myself: what have I done the previous day that entitles me to draw upon the nation’s precious water supply and enjoy a hot shower? I don’t see this as a basic human right; it should be earned. And what I did the other day was accompany my beloved to the Met to see Puccini’s Tosca.

She dearly loves grand opera and I dearly love her, and I was glad to go for the chance to see the tenor be executed and the soprano leap to her death. I enjoy violence more when it’s accompanied by great music.

What makes the Met’s Tosca remarkable is that the tenor’s girlfriend Tosca, sung by the six-two Norwegian goddess Lise Davidsen, towers over him and when they embrace, he disappears, and when they sing a duet, you forget he’s there. Her voice can go from pianissimo to pee-in-your-pants forte in two seconds and during one duet I somehow found myself thinking about transgenderdom. When I listen to people sing in Italian, my mind wanders.

The subject of transgender was more prominent in Trump’s 2024 campaign than in any presidential election I can recall. Reagan never went there, nor did George W. Maybe I’m hanging out with the wrong people but I wasn’t aware that it was such a major issue, the fear of trans boys competing in girls’ basketball.

I am not without prejudice and I admit that I would prefer that my cardiologist be okay with his or her birth gender. I’m not proud of it but there it is. As for basketball, I take no interest in it whatsoever and haven’t for years.

But the current bromance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, World’s Richest Man, forces me to take up the subject. I’ve long thought that there is something sopranoish and prima Donald about Trump, the fussiness with the hair, the adoration of the spotlight, the reverence for makeup. And Mar-a-Lago with all the frilliness and glitz, the gilded cherubs, the ladylike glamour — no man I know would feel comfortable there.

So watching the man’s victory speech on Election Night in which he spoke so admiringly about Musk’s Space-X rocket, it struck me as odd: you’ve just been elected Leader of the Free World and you’re fascinated by the size of another man’s rocket?

It just made me wonder if we haven’t elected our first trans president before electing our first woman.

El Don’s obsession with trans people in his campaign bore unmistakable signs of self-loathing and I think that we hippy-libs have a duty to encourage him to come out of the locker room and embrace his identity.

It’s heartwarming to see a 78-year-old person head-over-heels for a guy devoted to cars and rockets, and now that La Donna is elected, he can cut the macho act and bring out the pantsuits and high heels and just be himself. I’m an old Marxist-Communist but still I think power should be liberating: take that Oval Office and ovulate to your heart’s content, pal. “Trump Will Fix It” was the slogan and now it’s time for him/her/them to fix him/her/them. Everybody could tell that he needed a new pronoun and now he can have it by executive order.

Dawn is in love with his Musk,

They’re dancing together at dusk.

Each little fist bump

Makes her heart jump,

His tail and his tush and his tusk.

I wish Kamala had become First Woman President because she seemed actually interested in government and policy issues, more than in sharks and electric boats and Arnie Palmer’s manhood. But so be it, the voters have spoken. But let’s try to see the bright side.

If you are a soybean farmer in North Dakota and you feel God made a mistake in giving you a penis, you are in a tough spot and most trans farmers would take the easy way out and move to West Palm Beach, but a President with the courage to come out publicly on Day One and accept what is so clear about him could change that instantly.

He is a great storyteller. He loves the unexpected. His nomination of a Fox News host to head the Defense Department, and Matt Gaetz, under investigation for drug use and sex trafficking, nominated to be Attorney General. So why not hold a press conference wearing a sparkly red gown and jangly jewelry? People want entertainment. They’ll be talking about it for weeks. Fashion will trump inflation.

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