One more thing to think about

I don’t like to read about new medical discoveries for fear I may learn the wrong things, such as the news that childhood virus may be a factor in old-age dementia, which strikes me as brutally unfair, my having grown up one of six kids who passed viruses around like we shared beds and towels and hardly ever covered our mouths when we coughed. Mother said, “You’re going to get sick anyway, might as well hurry up and get it over with.” Little did she know it would lead to becoming a moron and nincompoop at the age of 83.

Not saying I am one, understand, only that I’m running a risk I didn’t know was there. I am still pursuing my goal of becoming the Country’s Oldest Successful Stand-Up Comic.

“Which country, pray tell?” you ask. That remains to be seen. My grandfather James was Canadian, so I have freedom of choice. Canada would give me the freedom to be provincial.

I caught a bug two weeks ago that produced no fever, no cough, no aches and chills, but it laid me low, I slept all night and half the day, was logy and dull, forgetful, had no appetite, so that it made my true love anxious. She was playing viola in a Mozart opera out West, enjoying herself, amusing her relatives, looking at great art, attending lectures, and when she phoned me to report on her hithering and spiritual furthering, I sensed that I didn’t cause her pulse the usual excitation. She loved me faithfully but not wantonly and with abandon.

“What is the cause of this heavy torpor?” I asked myself. “Could it be the fact that I am 83? Heaven forfend. ’Tis but a late bloom of youth. Could it be that I’ve abandoned any semblance of exercise and probably couldn’t do ten pushups in a row if a dagger were held to my throat? Prithee, unhand that thought!”

No, it is the gathering dark of autumn, the baring of the trees, the onset of winter, traces of snow already, the season of regrets for all I failed to accomplish in spring and summer. And regret that I did a benefit show in October.

I went to an Old Folks’ Home and did my stand-up act. It was a home for elderly musicians, The Dotted Rest, in the old Victor warehouse where phonographs were kept, the Victor turntables that put thousands of musicians on the dole, and now poor old broken-down pianists and songwriters sleep in rows of cots with flypaper hanging down from the ceiling, their cruel keepers herding them off to their pitiful repasts.

“Please keep your show to forty-five minutes or less and please do not ask them to sing along, it will break your heart,” I was told.

It was sad to see them, former ballet stars pushing walkers, great guitar-pickers who published instruction manuals and now their fingers were too torn up to hold a fork and spoon, singer-songwriters who once were household names and now nobody came to visit them — their children had gone to Yale and Harvard on the royalties, their grandchildren flew to Paris on a whim, but here were the neglected stars of yesterday wandering confused and forgotten in second-hand clothing and squalor, subsisting on freeze-dried hotdish and listening to themselves on tape cassettes of A Prairie Home Companion, the once-popular radio variety show. Chet and Butch and Bill, Sean and Don and Phil, once young people worshipped them and now the young are old themselves but they are not in old folks’ homes, no, they are in “senior living facilities,” and what is the difference twixt the two? A corporate executive’s salary, that’s what. When you subsist on the pittance from the A.F. of M. you get stuck in a cell with a stool at the window. Your only therapy is if you can’t pee, then they give you a diaper. And if you get hyper, pop in a pill. What a thrill.

Hear me now, youngsters. Save the piles of money you gain from AI, hoard the riches you harvest through robotics and the replacement of peasants by circuitry. Put your offspring on meager allowances and let them know: that much and no more and don’t ask.

Then gather your ill-gotten gains and join me at Paradise Point. The rooms are sunny, the food is good enough, and the staff is worshipful. When was the last time you felt truly adored? Tell the truth now. How long since your ring has been kissed?

The post One more thing to think about appeared first on Garrison Keillor.