Garrison Keillor's Blog

Life is an adventure, never ending; just when you think you’re on an even keel, the ground comes up to meet you. After church on Sunday I walked into the kitchen and slipped and fell and whacked my head hard into the corner of a wooden shelf over the table and felt blood on my forehead and went to find Jenny who was reading outdoors and she cried, “Oh my god,” and I said, “No, I’m only your husband.”

“Go to the bathroom!” she cried.
“Here? But I don’t need to.”
“Can you sit on the toilet?”
“I’ve done it thousands of times.”

She wiped blood up and put an ice pack on my head.
I suggested she put antiseptic on it.
“No, that’s old school,” she said.
I said, “So? I’m old.”

A bonk in the head led to a whole comedy routine. Remarkable.

I could feel I had rattled my brain, but I know that the mind is ever changing, gaps appear, sometimes enormous ones — I’m missing most of whatever I learned in college — and the secret of intelligence is forgetting what you don’t need. Einstein was able to come up with E=mc2 because he had only two kids, didn’t bother about his hair, skipped religion, didn’t care about sports, didn’t read fiction.

Me, I studied Henry James in college, pored over passages like Trying to ascertain if, indeed, Isabel intended to accompany him as promised to the soirée, glancing into her chambers he saw, reflected in the French mirror on her closet door, her pale naked figure like a classic Roman sculpture, the perfection of the image rendering it more like an idea than a living and breathing human — and thanks to him, I know less about economics than the average ten-year-old. Still, I know the basics. Early to bed, early to rise. Bird poop has to be cleaned off cushions or it creates a hole. Black is not a good color for a suitcase as you’d find at Baggage Claim when you see a hundred identical black bags go by: bright pink is better, sparkle green, puce, purple. Don’t drink alcohol and drive.

I quit alcohol 25 years ago when I had a small child and got drunk one night and put two and two together — “I don’t want her to see me like this and be embarrassed.” An easy decision.

I felt good Monday and celebrated by going to a barber, not a woman stylist who will nurture my hair as a sanctuary for my spirit on my earthly journey a but a guy with a revolving red-striped pole who’ll make me look nice.

Somehow the Sunday bump brought back a clear recollection of a miserable trip to Michigan years before, a delayed flight, lost prescriptions, a sleepless night, and a solo show in a theater, walking onstage to applause and feeling my whole monologue vanish from my head, a big whoosh of aphasia, a big blankness, so I stitched together other stuff, the story about throwing the rotten tomato at my sister and her chasing me across the yard and telling me I would spent eternity in hell fire, then Mazumbo the circus elephant tied to a stake and running his long trunk into the open window of the car as Dad pulled up next to him and all of us kids squealing as he sucked the hot dogs out of our hands, and then the World’s Largest Ball of Twine that a dairy farmer named Dick Nordquist created because he thought he might use the cord again and it grew to 15 feet in diameter and the hot core of the ball produced a gas, phlogiston, that cures phlegmaticism.

It was a good show. The laughs were long and hard, they made me feel like a famous stand-up comedian rather than a confused old man. Which is how I feel right now. Jenny wants me to see a doctor about the gash in the forehead and the weird dream I had Sunday night, and woke up and looked around for a “mouthpiece,” but I intend to move on.

Henry James’s brother William said, “Wisdom lies in knowing what to ignore.” Their nephew Jesse rode away from the banks he robbed and never looked back and his son Harry’s “Two O’Clock Jump” inspired the conception of thousands of children and his stepson Elmore sang,
I’m standin’ at the crossroads
And I don’t know which way to go.
But whichever way I’m heading
Is an adventure, that I know.

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I am an old man and quite aware of my earthly sojourn heading for Trail’s End, and me with much left to accomplish such as resume regular exercise and write a great American novel and set a new pole vault record for men over 80, but meanwhile I spend so much time searching for my glasses, my keys, my billfold, my cellphone, I probably could’ve written two or three great novels but then I wonder, “Does America really need another great novel?” Probably A.I. is taking over the field of fiction and soon we’ll see novels generated by ChatGPT such as The Great Moby-Dick in which Jay Gatsby sets out to impress Daisy Buchanan by water-skiing past her mansion on Long Island and is swallowed by the whale, or Grapes of War and Peace in which Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, disillusioned with capitalism, joins Ma Joad’s family on the road and is separated from Natasha who leads the Russian army against Napoleon and marries the wealthy Pierre, Andrei having fallen sick in the harsh winter, but is nursed back to health by Rose of Sharon.

A.I. would enable readers to get multiple novels for the price of one, such as Wuthering Eyre of Gulliver’s Expectations or Beloved Lolita on the Brave New Road, merging the best elements of each novel into a superior amalgamated mélange and save readers an enormous amount of time during which they could take up a program of regular exercise.

But meanwhile we saw the use of artificial intelligence in last week’s three-hour-fifteen-minute televised Cabinet meeting in which cabinet secretaries Rubio, Bondi, Kennedy, Rollins, Collins, Gabbard, Bessent, Burgum, Vought, McMahon, Hegseth, Noem, et cetera, sat around a long table and showered the boss with lavish compliments of a sort previously paid only to Divine Beings and dictators. They agreed that he was the greatest president in the history of America, without compare, whose perfect wisdom had led our country from the degradation and despair of Bidenism to the peak of such greatness beyond the power of language to describe.

There has never been a Cabinet meeting like it, I daresay, and the entire three hours is on YouTube for all to see over and over. You can hear Bondi say that the boss was “overwhelmingly elected by the biggest majority.” You can hear Witkoff say that it’s time for the Nobel people to get their act together and give the boss the Nobel Peace Prize, pronouncing it “noble” instead of the way it’s been pronounced in the past. Bessent said the boss’s tariffs would bring in $500 billion a year. Hegseth said America was safer than ever before. The Labor lady invited him to come and view his “big beautiful face” on the banner hanging on the front of her building.

The questions remaining, when the three hours concluded, were: Why would the United States need a Congress? What role does the judiciary fill? Both seem more like unnecessary decorations than useful assets. And why would the country need to elect a new boss in 2028? What purpose would it serve?

Of course the meeting drew scorn from the usual sources, the New York Times and the Washington Post and their embittered Leninist opinion columnists who are still obsessed with the Russia Russia Russia hoax and the fiction of the boss’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and his sale of memberships in Mar-a-Lago to wealthy people who wish to make his acquaintance and his steady stream of executive orders.

What remains to be accomplished? For one, the 2024 election should be made unanimous, and the Democrats who claim election to Congress should be sent to re-education camps. The American press is creating unnecessary discord in our country that serves no useful purpose, and if the Times and Post and 30 or 40 other cynical and disgruntled publications were to disappear tomorrow, who would notice? Not many of us.

Now that the Army has made Washington safe, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco will likely be next, making cities safer for the general population to freely express their admiration of the Leader.

Meanwhile, I am starting a new system of keeping my billfold, keys, glasses, and cellphone in the pockets of yesterday’s trousers, which I hang on the doorknob of my closet, and this system has worked well for almost a week. I saved three hours and fifteen minutes by doing that and those 195 minutes were the highlight of not only last week but also the year so far.

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My shirts come from the cleaners starched and pressed, nicely folded and buttoned, every button, and I look at them and think, “Technical wizardry has not yet developed a machine that will properly button shirts, not breaking the buttons, so who does this labor? Children? There are child labor laws. No, someone does it who was accustomed to something much worse such as persecution, semi-starvation, life in a shanty with primitive sanitation, that’s who.”

So where do we come up with this rage against undocumented immigrants? For someone from parts of Africa or Asia, this work would be a godsend. Where do we get off sending armed masked men to round them up like cattle? They’re people who do difficult necessary work. Until we switch to tunics, so long as there are bankers and other stuffed shirts, this is a decent job.

My darlings, not so many teenage boys are looking to work in construction as back when I was that age. They used to and now it’s rare. Men from South America and Asia will do those jobs. Artificial intelligence is not going to fix toilets or carry out trash.

After high school, I got a job as a dishwasher in a big hotel. It was sort of a game, working fast during mealtime, hustling to run racks of dishes on a conveyor through a washer, stacking, delivering, and it was sociable, four boys on a crew, and we did good work to keep on the good side of the cooks. The next year I was a part-time parking lot attendant on a crew working a 600-car college lot, managing the morning rush, keeping them in straight tight formation to achieve maximum capacity, yelling at haughty academics to bend them to my will, a perfect job for an 18-year-old.

The other day I saw a large woman in a yellow reflective vest striding through a traffic jam at the airport and yelling, “Keep moving up! Three lines! Tighten it up!” in the loudest voice a human being is capable of. I used to do that, now she does. She appeared to be Mexican.

The ICE spectacle is naked racist cruelty and my country is not a culture of cruelty, that is for Russia. Look in Putin’s eyes and you see ingenious cruelty. America has a long religious tradition that teaches kindness and respect. No Trump children are going to work at the cleaners buttoning shirts; they’re going to collect investment funds from Arab princelings.

But why belabor the obvious? It’s summer, time to take long walks and then sit on the porch and watch the river go by and think about the goodness of this land God drew our ancestors to. My mother’s family escaped from a cruel stepmother in Glasgow, a woman who abused her stepson for getting his girlfriend pregnant. He married the girlfriend and begat more children but she still mistreated him. My mother was his tenth child. She met my father, who descended from Yorkshiremen who escaped grim lives as farmworkers to become skilled carpenters and handymen. I’ve no idea what they’d make of me, an 83-year-old on tour as a storyteller and stand-up to paying audiences — probably think America is a generous country to pay for amateur entertainment when you can watch an auction or a revival service for nothing.

I did a show at an 1864 opera house in Gardiner, Maine, in August and that was my chance to work a lecture about the Civil War into the act, the abolitionist movement that conquered states’ rights to define our culture as one of individual opportunity — the idea that race or gender or religion or country of origin does not define a person, that each person contains great possibilities. And the audience believed me, so I hummed a note and the crowd sang about trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored and the verse about the circling camps, dews and damps, and flaring lamps. It was magnificent. A mature crowd, some of them almost as old as I, who hadn’t sung that song since the ninth grade, knew all the words and also “In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea with a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me,” and they tried to believe that too.

The Bible says God looks on us as individuals. But of course when Donald J. Trump sells Bibles he has endorsed and put his name on and sells autographed copies for $1,000, it does cast a shadow. I hope God will show mercy.

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Life is so dear, I can’t imagine what we’ll do when it’s over. The other night I lay awake for a while trying to think of the first name of the Romney who ran for president against Obama. I remembered it was in 2012 and I ran through an alphabet of men’s names, Al and Bob and Cal and so forth, and Mark seemed to ring a bell. I remembered his dad, George, and I remembered all too well the name of the guy who claimed Obama was born in Kenya and was ineligible to be president, but the gap remained.

You lie in the dark next to the woman you love (Jenny) and resist the mounting urge to climb out of bed and google Romney and yet as you work to bring him to memory, memory goes elsewhere. I remembered seeing Jacqueline Onassis once at a New York Public Library event honoring authors, standing in a hallway chatting with a gentleman, and then noticed a shadowy gentleman 20 feet away watching her, and it suddenly hit me what a strange route her adult life must’ve been. I remembered sitting next to Michelle Obama at a dinner for Senate wives in the winter of 2008. I was the speaker and was expected to be humorous and it was highly peculiar to realize that I wasn’t going to talk about the one thing that was on everyone’s mind, including the waiters’ (maybe especially the waiters’). I couldn’t talk about it because it was too enormous, the fact of the first African American First Family in our history.

I sat next to Mrs. Obama who sat next to Elizabeth Dole. I was in shock. You sit through dinner knowing the gigantic inadequacy of the remarks you will deliver as dessert, you look into your soul and are shaken by the insipidity of what you’re about to say. The First Lady conversed equally with me and Mrs. Dole, very graciously, very naturally — I admired the skill involved, how natural it was, and when a photographer asked her to stand with me, she did and she put an arm around my back. I admired that. Politics can be so wretchedly awkward, why not try to be graceful at least?

Someone introduced me, maybe Amy Klobuchar, and her compliments were like whiplashes, whack ka-ching ker-pow, and I got up and — God help me, it was something about baseball, which had nothing to do with anything — and then I remembered Romney’s name. Mitt. I didn’t have to go google him. I lay in bed. Jenny asked if I was all right. I was. I still am.

The speech at the Senate wives dinner was Al Franken’s idea and I said yes, feeling honored, and then it turned out to be humiliating, but the beauty of degradation is how it makes everything else shinier. I did some solo shows recently in Monterey, Napa, and the Presidio in San Francisco that I feel rather good about, with a monologue about the joys of being old — that you will not need to read Moby-Dick and will never go canoeing ever again or camping in the woods with children and you can avoid friends who’re too fond of tossing French phrases into conversation and then translating them for you.

I wind up with a long meandering tale about a family of loud talkers who love German shepherds and have five of them, dogs who were trained for security purposes to sniff people’s crotches, which makes them unpopular in town. A leash law is passed, whereupon a race of voracious rabbits is free to move in and destroy gardens. Two California condors are brought in to devour rabbits, which is disturbing to small children. There’s a pontoon boat with 21 agnostic Lutheran pastors on it and a man has a seizure and loses his mind and lifts barbells though he’s been told not to and dies of a heart attack and his ashes are buried in his briefcase during a violent thunderstorm and we stand, drenched, around the open grave singing How Great Thou Art and then remember he was an unbeliever so we sing Singin’ In The Rain.

I lay in bed, having all by myself recalled Mr. Romney’s first name, and my wife rolled toward me and lay asleep, her face shining in the moonlight, and a few hours later a doctor at Mayo ran a tube up a vein from my groin to my heart to install a tiny device to break up blood clots. It’s just one wonder after another.

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I sat next to a woman I didn’t know on a flight from Minneapolis to New York and we fell into conversation and I got to know her. She said, “You look a lot like my father.” Quite an opener for a woman almost my age. She said he was a social worker, a good man who wanted to make the world better but he saw so much trouble that he couldn’t believe in God. “He was a man with a lot of demons.” She said, “He used to say, ‘Being your dad was the best job I ever had and I was the worst man for the job.’” Quite a start and she was only drinking mineral water. And then she said, “And he was your biggest fan. He absolutely loved your radio show.”

It gives you something to think about, being loved by a complicated man. Puts me in the same position as she. But I love that phrase, “a man with a lot of demons,” a wonderful old-fashioned way of putting it, meaning “too complicated to unravel, just respect it and give it space.”

It’s a reward for a broadcasting career you don’t anticipate when you’re in the middle of it — the unexpected intimacy of a stranger — and she told me more, how he had the job of child protection for a time but it was so ugly so often, so painful, and they switched him to adult protection: looking after the elderly who wish to stay in their homes although they’re terribly vulnerable and less able to deal with emergencies, more apt to ignore them.

We talked about her heroic mother and I wondered about the demons but she didn’t offer details and then I said that I have a demon of my own. It’s one that’s not susceptible to reform. I regret my neglect of my aunts and uncles and teachers as they got older and faded and passed away, because now that it’s too late, I realize I’ve lost my history and it is irrecoverable. Especially the aunts: they knew what preceded me and how I came into the world, my parents’ passion for each other, their early religious experiences, the dilemmas they faced, the family rivalries, a large basis of my individual being. I did not invent myself by reading a book. I came from a people and I need to know them. Otherwise I am just one more chocolate chip cookie coming off the assembly line.

My uncle Don was a big hearty man, a passionate Packers fan and also a dedicated Bible scholar and a devoted husband who cared for Aunt Elsie at home through the course of her last devastating illness. At the funeral he told me, “Her sisters were surprised that I took care of her. Of course I took care of her. I loved her.” Elsie was tender, beautiful, gracious, very funny, forever welcoming, an ambitious cook, and he loved her and cared for her to the very end of her misery, not trusting her to strangers. But after Don got old and slow and unsteady, he found a rest home far away where he could go about the business of dying, and I never saw him again.

My demon, I guess, was ambition. You taste some success, you play the Orpheum, then it’s the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, then Radio City Music Hall, then Tanglewood and Wolf Trap, and then the ultimate, the Minnesota State Fair Grandstand. As a kid I sat in the stands and watched stock car races; as an adult I stood on a stage and sang “Hello, Love.”

I didn’t tell my neighbor all that; she had fallen asleep. But I could’ve told her much more easily than I could tell the relatives. We were not confiding people, by and large. I believe my father told me exactly one secret in his life: that while stationed in Manhattan during World War II, a man in uniform working in the Army Post Office, he had accepted free tickets to Broadway shows and had enjoyed them. (We were Plymouth Brethren who avoid worldly entertainment, preferring the joy of the Scriptures.) This is not what I’d call a close relationship.

And now I have told you, my friend. The woman is still asleep. The plane is descending toward LaGuardia and Manhattan, the scene of his sin. We have demons. They seem to diminish in old age. The future is the right direction. Let’s make it better. Thanks for listening.

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Scott Fitzgerald would be quite disappointed that the theft of a statue of him in St. Paul was not a better story, was in fact about as dumb as a crime story can be. A 37-year-old dimwit with a drug problem swiped the figure and drove it in his Jeep to a metal recycling company and tried to sell it for scrap. He gave them his actual name. They concluded (duh) it was stolen and reported his license plate number to police who went to the dimwit’s house and found pieces of the statue. A blowtorch was in the jeep.

A statue of Fitzgerald is worth more than scrap metal. If you wanted to get a good price, you’d cut the head off and hold it for ransom. And you’d have a better motive than gaining a couple hundred bucks to feed your fentanyl habit, you’d do it to gain the attention of a woman who has slighted you in favor of a wealthy guy who can afford to take her to Greece for a honeymoon and buy her a lavish mansion on Summit Avenue overlooking the Mississippi.

And you’d go for the big statue of Fitzgerald in Rice Park downtown. The dimwit snatched a little statue standing in front of an office building that used to be Fitzgerald’s prep school, and to the weary office managers and executive vice presidents who pass it every day, who were forced to read The Great Gatsby in tenth grade and didn’t get it, the statue is no more significant than a fire hydrant. The big statue downtown is worth at least a quarter million and, best of all, the rich guy’s father donated half the cost of it. The insult of decapitation is going to hit the McMonaham family as a personal insult. The McMonahams own 3M, the company that put St. Paul on the map; their name is where 3M’s name comes from.

The Fitzgerald they financed stands in Rice Park, Scott holding his hat, coat over his arm, looking toward the George Latimer Library, his back to the old federal courthouse where some great Thirties gangsters were put on trial, including Ma Barker’s gang who kidnapped William Hamm of the brewing family. They were no pikers, they thought big.

Few persons noticed the disappearance of the little Fitz statue but the downtown crime would be front page in the Pioneer Press and there’d be a photo of the headless author and also the ransom note taped to the base:

The McMonahams and 3M destroyed this city, putting its smart young people to work making Scotch Tape and Post-it Notes instead of creating great art. We took Scott’s head and we’ll return it only when the McMonahams put up a quarter million to publish my novel Hotel St. Paul. Show some class. It’s a classic.

Never before had an author shown such bravado as to commit a felony as a way of getting published. Authors had worked lousy jobs dishwashing and parking cars, attended writing courses taught by bipolar celibates, sucked up to editors, but here at last was an author who believed in himself enough to commit crime.

The heroine of Hotel St. Paul is a brave young woman, Jenn Ayre, who declines the offer of marriage from a pretentious professor in favor of a stand-up comedian. The professor taught poetry so that none of his students cared to read any for the rest of their natural lives, but the comic amuses the plain folk by pissing on pretense and goosing grandiosity, does more for civility than the jerk with the mortarboard. The comic adores her. The professor hopes she’d advance his career.

The McMonahams order a temporary head to be molded of hard rubber. They hire detectives to track down the culprit, without success. They suspect their daughter: the description of Jenn Ayre fits her rather well. And then the missing head turns up — in the McMonaham laundry. Their cleaning lady Lola confesses: she wrote the novel. They read it. It’s brilliant. It’s published to rave reviews. Lola reveals that she’s not Mexican but a member of the Ukrainian royal family in exile. The daughter marries her boyfriend, the wedding is held at the Hotel St. Paul across the street from the statue, and the guests dance on the plaza around the fountain, Scott watching them, coat in hand.

This is a better story. If it’s worth stealing, it’s worth stealing nobly.

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Nobody asked me but I’ll say it anyway: Democrats need to find themselves a good sport for their top candidates to play so we don’t only see them standing at lecterns and lecturing about injustice and climate change and the danger plastics pose to porpoises. Hillary and Kamala could’ve beaten the yahoo if they’d only been a little less wonky, not so Brightest Girl in the Whole Class, more good-timey, with a joke at the ready, less First Class Girl Scout of the Year, more All-Around Best Friend. Either of them would’ve looked great on horseback but young brainy girls like them thought horseback riding was for debutantes. Wrong.

Golf is no good, an enormous waste of public land and an antisocial game that instills self-loathing in its practitioners. But a smart well-spoken woman in jeans and denim jacket on a handsome horse trotting through the woods, jumping a ditch, breaking into a gallop, her hair flying, says a lot about leadership and self-confidence.

Bowling would’ve been good too, the three strides, the swing, the rumble of the ball, the crash of the pins. Someone should’ve taught Hubert Humphrey to bowl. The man had no sport to speak of, not even ping-pong. A strike, Hubert leaping in the air, pumping his fist, the shout of “Yes!” and we’d have been spared Richard Nixon.

There is only so much hectoring about policy that we voters can tolerate and then it’s time to move on. Schumer at the lectern, peering over his spectacles, warning about grim consequences — Sanders predicting cataclysm — Pelosi denouncing corrupt deeds — the fact is that church attendance has been declining for decades and moral condemnation doesn’t have the traction it once did. If a close warm personal relationship with a convicted child molester isn’t enough to outrage people, it’s time to be positive and find a Democrat who looks good at the rudder of a sailboat.

That was JFK’s ticket, plus good looks and a handsome head of hair blowing in the wind. Yes, maybe you suspected he was a womanizer, which Nixon obviously wasn’t, but Americans admire yachtsmanship, it being a skill claimed by so few.

Carter was a runner, which was fine until he overdid it running a six-mile race and collapsed in full public view, the leader of the free world lying pale, semiconscious, looking like death on toast, which left him vulnerable to Reagan who looked good on a horse thanks to his acting experience at Warner Bros.

Democrats are susceptible to the goody-goody stereotype. They take themselves too seriously and come off as pretentious prudes. Not a good look. Obama was the exception. He wasn’t afraid to play basketball in public and he looked good. He turned the White House tennis court into a basketball court for pick-up games. He was the real deal. He also knew how to be really funny.

Al Gore was a handsome guy, good military record, but the yammering about climate change and making people feel guilty for using baggies and plastic wrap gave us eight years of the Shrub during which the government sat and twiddled its thumbs. Al should’ve taken up rock climbing and wilderness hiking, grilling venison over an open fire, drinking a Bud, telling dirty jokes. But no, he lectured his head off and we elected the frat boy.

Walter Mondale was a very nice man and a fisherman but not a fly fisherman, just a guy in a boat with a fishing rod and a bobber. And his dad was a minister and so Walter sounded like he was just about to recite the Beatitudes and dive into prayer.

People mention Pete Buttigieg as a presidential possibility and face it, a gay man needs to start thinking about a sport pronto. Hunting would be fine. The current guy, Mr. Queens, never shot a gun, had a dog, or told a joke, which leaves a lot of masculine territory open for Pete. Rural America sees Democrats as the party of Bridge & Backgammon, and if Pete and his husband went to Montana and bagged a grizzly, it’d be a darned good start.

Stay away from clothing in colors that say “gay” — go for red plaid shirts. Short-haired dogs. Take the road untaken by Democrats and have a good time where people can see it. And don’t talk about diversity; talk about adversity, the bear coming at you out of the tree, you raised the rifle, snapped it off Safety, blew the bastard’s brains out. That’s the road to victory.

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I’ve been seeing doctors lately, which is okay by me. I am a triumph of modern medicine, an 83-year-old with an adolescent pig valve in my heart and when you imagine how many pigs must’ve given their lives before science got that procedure figured out, pigs who gave up their chance at a rich full life and the pleasure of parenthood, it obliges me not to spend my bonus years watching sitcoms. But thanks to medicine, I received extra time to make several serious mistakes and have the chance to recover.

I am very fond of doctors. Competence is admirable, especially when it’s for your own personal benefit. I like to write limericks for them, such as the neurologist Matthew Fink:

I went to see Doctor Fink
Who said, “It’s good you don’t drink,
And by whatever path you
Can avoid math you
Will be happier, I think.”

I sit in the waiting room and in five minutes I can write a pretty decent one:

I go to see Doctor Tom Nash
About jitters, soreness, or rash,
Or aches in my legs
And I pay him with eggs
And vegetables instead of cash.

What better thing to do while sitting and looking at your fellow patients and not allowing yourself to ask, “What’s wrong with you?”

My physician, Doctor Hensrud,
Saw me once partially nude,
Which wasn’t shocking
But he started talking
About my intake of food.

I feel pretty good and sometimes terrific even as I am slowly falling apart. I was in the hospital for eyelid surgery a few weeks ago and came under the ministrations of heroic nurses, a cult of kindness and patience. Lying miserable in the night, alarmed by thoughts of losing my sight and the world becoming a blank page, I pressed the red buzzer button and heard gentle footsteps and a kind soul said, “How can I help?”

Good Lord, it was a man. Someone from my gender of hockey players slamming opponents into the boards, but instead he dripped saline drops into each burning eye. I didn’t tell him I was miserable; I could tell from the gentleness of his hand and voice that he knew.

Tennessee Williams said, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” And so do we all.

In the annals of human suffering, surgery post-op doesn’t rank high, but I feel aligned with my beloved old relatives who slipped away. I was a busy achiever, I was not a comforter, I had no time for hand-holding. I grieve for Jimmy, Bruce, Roger, Lynn, Freddy, who died young, the lives unlived. I pray for my dependents.

I ask a favor of God, that I not die a dumb death. Let me leave in dignity, please. Tennessee Williams strangled to death, swallowing a bottle cap. My friend Barry Halper, 21, driving to start his first radio job east of St. Paul early one morning, looked away from the road — to turn on the radio? To reach for the cigarette lighter? — and crashed into the rear of a school bus. Dead. Gone. An only child. At the funeral, I sat next to his mother, her arms around me, sobbing on my shoulder.

I imagine myself walking along Amsterdam Avenue one sunny afternoon, not noticing the bike lane, and a delivery man on a fast electric bicycle kills me. He’s carrying a half-gallon container of my favorite pasta of all time, orecchiette alla barese with sausage and broccoli, tomato sauce, garlic, parmesan. My body is thrown into a No Parking zone, covered with pasta sauce. Even though unconscious, I can smell it.

A woman dashes out and feels for my pulse and there is none. Passersby pause and then continue. The delivery man leaves quietly with his bicycle. A squad car pulls over and sees an elderly man who apparently ate too much. No billfold in his pocket. The delivery guy took it and is on the phone a few blocks away, buying himself a one-way ticket to Rome on my Visa card. First class, why not.

His girlfriend works at a bank nearby. Between the two of them they clean out my checking account of thirty thou. After all, it was traumatic for him too.

Keep me on the sidewalk and out of the bike lane, Lord. Don’t let me die covered in tomato sauce. Let me finish up today in good style and then we’ll talk about tomorrow.

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I dreamed about my Grandma Dora the other night and told her about my vision problems and she said, “There is no cure for carelessness. You should’ve taken a good brisk walk every day and you couldn’t because you lived in the city. But you inherited good genes from me and my husband, thanks to which you have practically no anxiety and sleep well and wake up fresh. So what if you see double and can’t read small print? Do your best with what you have.”

Grandma was a seamstress who made her own elegant clothes. She and her twin sister, Della, were Western Union telegraphers, and Grandma also taught school and was a pre-suffrage feminist, and then she married Grandpa who was a better reader than a farmer but adored her, and she bore him eight children whom she loved dearly and believed could do no wrong. She admired technology and science and looked forward to progress on all fronts. I think I take after Grandpa and luckily avoided farming and took up broadcasting. In that line of work, you give the weather, you don’t depend on it.

There’s nothing so fortunate as having the right ancestors, and Grandma Dora is still with me. And now I am just one year younger than she when she died of a stroke at 84. I sat holding her hand in the hospital, thinking of the questions I wished I had asked. Thanks to anti-seizure meds, I apparently have extra time and I should use it to good purpose and a week or so ago I decided what that purpose should be.

Grandma worked hard all her life, and after she raised her kids and Grandpa died, she made the rounds of her daughters, doing laundry, cooking, cleaning, minding children. I prefer to plow new ground and devote myself to sheer simple unalloyed devotion to pure pleasure and let the world deal with its own problems as best it can. Let a man’s life end with a sabbatical.

I came by this revelation in Logan, Utah, but not from an angel handing me golden tablets. No, from a crowded theater where the audience, at my invitation, sang our national anthem so beautifully, followed by the Battle Hymn of the Republic and “How Great Thou Art” and “It Is Well With My Soul,” in full harmony from the heart, a force of nature, and it brought tears to my eyes, me singing a soft basement part.

I make no comment about their doctrine but Mormons do love to sing. And it was clear from crowd unreaction to a couple lines of mine that a goodly number of them had voted for a convicted criminal and chronic liar who cut cancer research to benefit billionaires, but I say no more. Let George F. Will and Susan B. Glasser take it from here.

I flew home the next day and, without meaning to, boarded an electric passenger cart, the young man at the wheel was so friendly, I got on and immediately felt ashamed — I mean, I’m 83 but I’m still ambulatory — but as he tooled down the concourse, veering through streams of pedestrians, I had to admit, It was enjoyable. The driver was from Rwanda and most of the other cart drivers appeared to be African. They all seemed to know each other and form a brotherhood with the wheelchair pushers, waving to each other, high-fiving, kidding around. There was a lot of good feeling going around. I pursue brotherhood on the stage, storytelling, reciting, humming a note and hearing the crowd sing about the sweet chariot, the brown-eyed girl, the river that flows by the throne of God, the amazing grace, the home on the range.

I come from people who read Ecclesiastes, the verse that says he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow, and so I avoid the front-page story saying that America is incapable of fighting a protracted war against a major power and prevailing — not due to woke generals but to industrial incapacity. I’d rather be happy on the road doing shows. My life is quite easy, why fight it? It’s advantageous to be 83. The country is not looking to my generation for leadership. We’re done. We are, by virtue of old age, humorists. If we take ourselves seriously, we become ridiculous — like our aged commander and his ideas about Canada, Greenland, Gaza, tariffs, the border wall, Ukraine, prosperity, and the use of capital letters to indicate seriousness.

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I did a show Saturday night singing duets with a tall woman and was so fascinated by the perfect harmonies on the Everlys’ “Let It Be Me” that I forgot to take an intermission until almost two hours had passed and I saw elderly people my age dashing in panic up the aisle to empty their bladders, a weird feeling, to create something so wonderful you wind up torturing people, sort of like painting a mural so beautiful people gaze at it and don’t notice the stairs and fall and break an arm.

I was a writer for years but dreamed of being a singer and now here I was singing good tenor to a fabulous soprano, meanwhile hundreds of people were hoping not to wet their pants. An out-of-body experience for me, a physical reality for them.

It’s a night I’ll remember for the rest of my life (I’m 83) whereas vast acres of my middle and elder years are a blank to me, which worries my beloved. “You remember that September in Paris, the little café on the square with the fountain, the strolling gypsy guitarist,” she says, but I don’t. “The nymph in the fountain, the pigeons on her shoulders?” Don’t remember them either.

I remember when I was a kid, our family driving home from Sunday night gospel meeting and stopping at A&W for root beer floats, how beautiful they were after an hour of contemplating eternal damnation. I remember being sent to Aunt Jo’s house when my mother was having babies, a house with a wood-burning stove and outhouse like in Little House on the Prairie. I remember my first time on skis, skidding down a steep hill and thinking, “I will never do this again,” a promise I have kept.

The show with Heather Masse, the tall woman, was at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, where I had done hundreds of shows back in a former life, and people asked, “Doesn’t it feel wonderful to be back here?” and the answer was No. Way too much went on there for anyone to remember. Clutter preventing nostalgia.

But I remember doing shows at Radio City Music Hall with Don and Phil Everly thirty-some years ago. The two in shiny green suits rising on the stage elevator, strumming, singing “I bless the day I found you, I want to stay around you,” the beautiful sigh of the crowd. I grew up listening to them, my favorite pop stars — I come from polite well-behaved people so the Stones and the Dead were not available to me; I liked Simon and Garfunkel and Don and Phil.

Backstage I noticed that the brothers never kidded each other and hardly ever looked each other in the eye. Thirty years of close harmony singing the same hit songs night after night, year after year, handcuffed in stardom, had created a brotherhood that threatened to devour them so they were very formal around each other. Chet Atkins and Leo Kottke were on that show along with my Shoe Band and all of them joked around more or less continually, trying to make everyone laugh. Every guitarist’s secret wish, to put down the Martin and pick up a mic and do a stand-up comedy.

After the show Saturday, in bed at the hotel, lying next to my beloved reading Jane Eyre, I asked, “How’s that book you’re reading?” She said, “It’s great.” In other words, “Don’t talk to me.” And I wondered if she’d read some of my books. I wrote quite a few. If you slept with an author, wouldn’t you think you might? Or no? Maybe romance requires mystery, and intimacy is about intimations. Not many therapists marry their patients. And perhaps my deletions of recall are a way of staying young. I had my regrets about the show last night and now it’s a new day and a fresh start. And believe it or not, I’m working on a musical about longevity. People dread getting old but they don’t want to die: that’s the hook.

The secret is not a calm disposition.
It isn’t a deep inner strength
Or a good physician.
The secret of longevity is length.

Dinner waited on the table
And Mrs. Melville paced the floor
As Herman worked his little fable
Slowly into something more.

Each hour, each day, each step you take
Creeps slowly like a crustacean,
Until the candles on your cake
Become a conflagration.

Life is good, people. Especially if you use the Delete key.

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