Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 10

I am looking forward to November 6 when at last we may be done with the “How in the world is this actually happening in America today” conversation and we will return to enjoying our lives, watching the weather, maybe reading a classic or two, maybe read aloud to a child, perhaps take a walk out of earshot of freeways, maybe astonish a distant relative by writing a letter longhand in ink offering your humorous take on life as you observe it, maybe deal with the boxes of junk in the back of your closet. We will leave the past decade to platoons of authors to dredge through sloughs of the irrelevant and ridiculous and our national leaders will turn their attention to the real world.

In New York, traffic will resume moving on Fifth Avenue, which the Secret Service has pinched tight to protect Melania and Barron up in their tower, and someone will show mercy to poor Rudy in his cruel downfall and it will no longer be required of all Republicans that they reaffirm that up is down and it’s 1953 and Commies in the State Department are selling us down the river and we’ll go back to being the country God intended us to be, one with a sense of humor and gratitude for His generosity and a decent respect for the facts.

This is English I’m writing, it’s not a mysterious code carrying secret instructions to election judges, it’s a gorgeous language rich with a wealth of synonyms for b.s., including twaddle, hogwash, babble, blather, bilgewater, humbug, balderdash, baloney, malarkey, piffle, tripe, drivel, dreck, rubbish, hooey, claptrap, crapola, and a crock, and if you go online and read a transcript of the guy woofing for two solid hours in front of his followers, you will see him clear as day. It’s a stream of darkness, no structure, nothing solid, no factual footing, and never before has a major party candidate offered such a negative vision of a failed nation, criminals coming from countries we’ve never heard of so you can’t walk across the street to get groceries, illegal migrants living in luxury hotels at government expense while our veterans are sleeping on the streets in front of those hotels, the country is going to hell, becoming a dumping ground for the world’s criminals. A dumping ground. Our country. A dumping ground.

Except for Arnie Palmer’s penis, it’s a very dark picture, the government is run by low-IQ people, very stupid people, who have weaponized the Justice Department and the FBI against him, but in January he’s going to tell them, “You’re fired. Get out.” Otherwise the country is done for. Ruined. Cratered. Crippled.

One reason for his appeal is repetition. The guy likes to say things three times in a row. He ended inflation, the numbers were the best numbers that ever were, there was no inflation, zero, and he made China pay. Other presidents didn’t get ten cents from China; he got hundreds of thousands of billions of dollars. Hundreds of thousands of billions. From China. Other presidents got zero. He got hundreds of thousands of billions. There is a rhythm to his weave, a definite rhythm that is not like any other politician’s.

We’re being ripped off by everybody, and our friends do it worse than our enemies. Ripped off. Us. By our friends. We used to be great and now we’re turning into a third-world country. Because they’re ripping us off. Our friends. Us. Ding, ding, ding, ding. If he’d been in office, Russia never would’ve invaded Ukraine. Never. No chance. Zero. Zero chance. Never would’ve happened. Big buildings knocked down and a lot of people got killed. Never would’ve happened with him. Stupid people let Ukraine happen. If he was there, no way. Zero. October 7th in Israel, never would’ve happened. Stupid people let that happen. There’s something wrong with these people. Something wrong. The worst people in the history of this country. Sick people who lie about everything. We’ve never seen anything like it. Lie after lie after lie after lie. The level of lying is just incredible. You can’t even imagine it’s legal.

If the Times and the Post would just quote the guy word for word, he’d be down around 15% but no, they try to explain him. If everyone just read what he says, this never would’ve happened. No way. Zero. It’s baloney, babble, claptrap, crapola, blather, piffle, hooey. Never should’ve happened. November 6th, it stops. MAIA. Make America Intelligent Again.

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I flew to Dublin a week ago and even with jet lag, it was downright glorious and I’m eager to do it again. I flew out of JFK, a prison camp attached to a strip mall, and landed seven hours later and was struck by the friendliness. The immigration lady seemed glad I had come and I got into conversations at baggage claim simply by asking questions. I find the Irish accent impenetrable but when I cupped my ear and said, “Eh?” they instantly switched to clear English.

The cabdriver was friendly. I asked him about Gaelic and he said, “Yes, they teach it in the schools but we forget most of it except for a few words and not many of us could carry on a conversation.” I asked him about the Irish gypsies, the Travelling People, and he said, “Yes, you still see some horse-and-buggy folk but they don’t allow them to camp on the roadsides anymore. They’re trying to settle them.” The cab fare was 31 euros and I handed him a fifty and said, “Thank you,” and he hesitated. “Are you sure?” he said. A cabdriver trying to decline a tip. Remarkable.

My hotel was the Grafton on Stephens Street in the old section of town, among walking streets with little shops, and I encountered such kindliness out walking, due to my poor vision and inability to read the street signs painted on the second-story corners of buildings, I kept asking for directions and Irish people recognized my accent and some recalled their own time in America and some conversations came to the point either sitting down for coffee or moving on and I kept moving.

I walked into the hotel restaurant and got the best breakfast buffet ever, an assembly of croissants and pastries, perfectly poached eggs, ham, bacon, cereals, cakes, jams, and coffees and teas, and friendly uniformed women with impeccable manners there to assist. I cupped my ear and they spoke clear English.

I walked around the neighborhood and felt welcome there. And what made it especially pleasant was getting away from the news of the impending American catastrophe. If the lunatic felon is elected and takes his revenge on his opposition and uses the Army to round up migrants and destroys the economy, Dublin strikes me as a beautiful place to live out the rest of my life.

The party of Lincoln has been corrupted on the national level: you cannot be a Republican without swearing to things you know are not true. Its standard-bearer runs for office on the proposition that America is a hellhole, which everyone knows it is not. New York, for example, has seen a steep decline in violent crime. But mid-America still believes in the mythical city where gangs roam the streets freely doing what they will.

Some blame goes to the Left, which holds that we must never be content, there is more to be done, and which, in good times, can always find injustice to complain about, and it is married to the idea that ours is a racist society. It refuses to acknowledge that great strides have been made.

For the felon, resentment is a powerful platform, the idea that a contemptuous elite has rigged the system to their own benefit. And your Mexican cleaning lady, the construction and farm workers, nannies, are an advanced invading force, and soon we’ll be singing “La bandera de las estrellas” instead of The Star-Spangled Banner.

Trump is a conman, as obvious as a $15 bill, and the New York Times, in all its high-mindedness, has absolutely no power against him. Millions of Midwesterners get a thrill voting for a convicted felon and a blatant liar that they never got from the Bushes. Let Putin have Ukraine, Poland, Germany, who cares? Climate change is nonsense, the climate’s been changing for eons. Skip the flu vaccine and inject Clorox. Drill for oil in the national parks, give Elon Musk the Federal Reserve, shut down the Fake News, MAGAnetize the country under one label, United Trump. How does one fight the conviction of unreality?

I can see the day when I’ll be an alien in my native land and when that day comes, there’s always Dublin.  I have no Irish blood in me but I vote for the pleasure of conversation and stories and gratitude for the blessings of life. The felon has no humor and no manners. Dublin has it all. A person could be happy there.

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I once owned a house on Goodrich Avenue in St. Paul, across the street from a house Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald rented in 1921 when Zelda gave birth to their daughter, Scottie, and this slight proximity let me imagine that someday college kids would write dull term papers about me as they do about The Great Gatsby and The American Dream. I tossed that idea aside long ago. Now I’m38 years older than he when he died, and clearly I got a better life and what’s the purpose of longevity if not to enjoy it?

I had my adventures with gin and whiskey, as he did, and sat in a bar with vets going to the U on the G.I. Bill who thought the Army was ridiculous but then they hadn’t been shot at. I once tasted a Bordeaux from the year of my birth (1942), which was pretty magnificent, war wine from the grapes of wrath. I once was given a sedative for a wisdom tooth extraction that made me ecstatic for a day and a half. I was baptized in waist-deep water by a preacher in a suit and tie. I entered many churches and heard the Gospel and confessed my sins and was forgiven. I wrote for a great editor, Roger Angell, who sent me delicate rejections — passages of wonderful writing but somehow it wasn’t you at your best — and crisp acceptances — and pleading letters — Everyone around here keeps asking when will we see another piece by Keillor. Write, I beg of you. — and I felt privileged for twenty years.

Once, playing third base in a softball game, I cleanly fielded a stinging grounder, backhanded it, planted my right foot, and threw the runner out by a stride, a perfect play, still vivid in my memory sixty years later. So is Uncle Jim’s hayrack pulled by two black horses, me holding the reins as Jim opened the gate and out to the field we clip-clopped to rake up the hay.

I performed at Goshen College and got the audience to sing “It Is Well with My Soul” and suddenly it was better with my soul than it had been in a long time. I have canoed in the Boundary Waters wilderness and slept on a beach and listened to the loons. I sat with my grandma Dora as she lay dying and sang to my mother in her last hours. I have embraced women in the dark while stunned with desire and I accepted my daughter from the obstetrical nurse a minute after she was born on December 29, which changed Christmas for me forever. I have made fifty or sixty ritual visits to the Minnesota State Fair for corn dogs and Ferris wheel and poultry barn. My brother Philip and I went canoeing around the Apostle Islands on Lake Superior and paddled into a deep cavern under one of the islands, and explored it for a while, ducking our heads under the low rocky ceiling, and then paddled out to open water a minute or two before the wake of a distant ore boat came crashing into the cave, four-foot waves that would’ve smashed us to a pulp, no need for EMTs, the turtles would’ve feasted that night.

I stood shoulder to shoulder with women who were real singers and sang duets with them, Renée Fleming, Brandi Carlile, Emmylou Harris, Heather Masse, and I knew the Lord was bestowing a privilege He wasn’t handing out like Tootsie Rolls. I stand next to Heather and we harmonize on the Dead’s “Brokedown Palace” and my heart is full. For an old writer, this is the gift of tongues.

I was brought up to be fearful but when we escaped from the cavern, which was back when I was Fitzgerald’s neighbor in St. Paul, I loosened up some. There’s nothing like almost but not dying to turn on the lights. Years later I got to know the director Robert Altman who was dying but still took joy in his work and I hope to wind up like that. He’d piloted B-17s and faced Japanese kamikaze, and not dying turned out to be awfully good for him. Nuts to the American Dream. I wake up eager in the morning and reluctantly turn in for the night. Thank you, Lord, for this life and guard our people from disaster and grant them wisdom if not abundance. For the sake of the children, keep the elderly incoherent crackpot out of the White House.

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It was a good week. It began with a night I lay awake for hours listening to my daughter’s hacking cough in the next room like an inmate in the county tubercular farm. We were both weary the next day until we remembered a ride at the Minnesota State Fair from 12 years before, the River Run ride, the two of us on a raft racing around a sluiceway, that I’d shot a video of with my phone. Last week I got a new iPhone but she found the video on it, two solid minutes of her hysterical laughter as she watched water splashing on her father’s lap so that it appeared he had wet his pants. I pretended to be horrified but I kept recording her crazy beautiful laughter.

We ate soup for supper and she, with no trouble at all, texted the Pee Ride video to her aunt Kay and our friend Heather, each of whom texted back within minutes their delight at this video. To me, this alone justifies the invention of the phone that can text, though I, along with every other elderly person, have said caustic things about texting in the past. So? I changed my mind. Now I can see the good it can accomplish in our troubled world. Kay had been watching her favorite basketball team get drubbed and Heather had been teaching first grade. Two minutes of my girl delighted by the apparent urinary tract problems of her elderly father was exactly what they needed.

The video turned the week around. She pulled out of the respiratory troubles that had her mother and me and our girl in mutual misery and two days later I flew to Dublin and the next night made a crowd happy at Liberty Hall Theatre. I’ve played theaters but don’t remember playing a theatre and of course for a man my age, liberty is a beautiful thing and worth flying to Ireland to find. They didn’t laugh the way my daughter laughed at the Fair but that’s because I hadn’t drunk enough liquid.

I love making people laugh; it’s better than pity. I’m 82, people see me shuffling down the street, they think, “O my God, someday I’ll be like that too,” so they take up elliptical machines so as to avoid my fate, a member of the generation that screwed up the country and now our kids are wondering what to do with us, if they should stick us in some Nazi nursing home or should they wax our floors and put some loose rugs around so we can trip and fall and break our necks.

Elliptical machines may age you faster. Nursing homes are full of elliptical exercisers who got distracted and twisted their backs so they can’t drink orange pop anymore because it hurts to hiccup. And you can go for years without a sip of orange pop but it’s when you can’t have any that you desperately need it. That’s just how it is.

Life is precarious. You can’t always get what you want. Mick Jagger said so and now that he’s 81 he knows it’s true. I grew up in Minnesota where there are more Scandinavians than anyone needs, people whose idea of delight is “not that bad.” Trump complains about Hispanics crossing the southern border, I say we need more of them and more people disappearing over the northern border.

The Norwegian couple was celebrating their 25th anniversary and she kicked him under the table hard and said, “That’s for twenty-five years of bad sex.” He kicked her back harder and said, “That’s for knowing the difference.” I don’t tell that joke in Minnesota because people might think I’m making fun of them.

I grew up Sanctified Brethren, which is like Norwegian except they think it’s redemption. Their idea of ministry was gathering to read the obituaries and sending gospel tracts about eternal damnation to the survivors of the deceased. I got out as quickly as I could.

What I tried to convey to the Dublin crowd is the fabulous joke that you don’t truly appreciate the beauty of life until you come close to the end, which should make you sad but doesn’t because it’s incredibly beautiful. My daughter’s wild laughter delights me but in her absence, Dubliners’ will do. A glass of water was provided onstage and I was tempted to spill on myself but it was an older audience and they might not’ve seen it as a joke.

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The Democratic nominee proposes Medicare assistance for home health aides to help people who must care for elderly parents while holding down a job and perhaps raising children, and on the same day the journalist Bob Woodward makes serious allegations about the Republican nominee to which a Republican spokesman says the journalist is “a total sleazebag who has lost it mentally.” There is the 2024 campaign in a paragraph. Serious civics versus a bucket of bird droppings.

This is not the Republican Party that my father respected, the party he felt he could trust to separate truth from fiction. The party of Dwight Eisenhower has been hijacked by a New York playboy who wants Air Force One and the helicopter and the Marine honor guard and though he’s been convicted of sexual assault and fraud, 80 million Americans love him and it will give them a thrill to vote for him. I’m glad my father isn’t here to witness this.

Of course you already know this. We’re two nations and either you believe the 2020 election was stolen and the crowd who took over the Capitol the following January were true patriots or you are confident it was not and that they were felons. There isn’t room for negotiation.

It’s a revolt by Middle America against the coasts, old against young, commoners against college, evangelicals against agnostics, McDonald’s against pad thai, and I as an old Minnesota grad fond of the quarter-pounder feel conflicted, especially when I read that what infuriates Republicans most is political correctness. It irks me too.

It’s why I haven’t listened to public radio for fifteen years. Because even as Russia pounds Ukraine and Gaza is in ruins and fentanyl flows across the borders and the oceans are warming, which contributes to the monster hurricanes, if you listen to NPR you get the feeling that the major problem facing us today is the unhappiness of nonbinary teenagers. The mayor of New York is indicted, his staff flees, New Yorkers know what’s going on, it’s an old old story, but because he is Black, it has to be tiptoed around: the problem is that this great city is a one-party town that tolerates corruption and it needs a mayor who loves the city and that ain’t Eric Adams. It needs a Republican from Missouri who enjoys art and music and food and who feels happy in a crowd experiencing diversity up close.

It’s an election coming up that half the country imagines might bring about less regulation, big tax cuts in the upper brackets, cuts in Medicare and public education, the deportation of ten million, a ban on abortion, but I don’t see that. I see a police van pulling up to the gates of Mar-a-Lago and the Secret Service turning over their charge to court deputies who’ll ship him off to a nice facility in Connecticut that’s reserved for special cases.

There’ll be photographers at the gate and then that’ll be the end of it. The man will be given a very quiet life. Introspection will be inevitable. Maybe he and Mayor Adams will be cellmates. Over time they may develop a rapport. Instead of Fox or NPR they may pick up a Bible and feel the Creator’s great love for them and accept forgiveness and be changed. It has happened before. The freedom to be free of yourself: that’s what it’s always been about.

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I flew home to New York from Seattle Saturday night, landed at JFK, retrieved my bag at Baggage Claim, headed for the taxi stand and there, in a long slow line, suddenly heard people shouting, “Doctor! Doctor!” and saw, fifty feet away, a twentyish woman lying face down on the sidewalk, an older woman kneeling over her. The kneeling woman shouted, “Does anyone know this girl? Anybody? Please!” Some traffic guys in bright orange vests ran off and came back with two big burly cops. The young woman lay motionless. One of the cops got on his phone and the other lay down next to her and put his hand on her back and spoke to her.

It was a dramatic sight, a lone person fallen in the midst of a busy scene in a huge city and you could see the alarm in the faces of the people in the taxi line: there but for the grace of God go I. I wanted to stay and find out if she was okay but I am not a doctor and the cops seemed to have it well in hand. So I got in a cab and headed home to Manhattan.

I got home and googled “woman collapsed at JFK” and got a stream of clippings about President Kennedy.

I thought about her in church Sunday morning and prayed for her well-being. God does not need Google and He knows what we pray for without our having to go into detail. I prayed that she was enjoying the city and now had a keener sense of living in a civil society — where we look after each other as best we can. I’ve had my own wobbly moments due to poor vision and have crashed on the sidewalks of New York and I know that if you do, you will be surrounded within five seconds by concerned New Yorkers.

Something similar happened Friday as I was walking around Whidbey Island north of Seattle where I was about to perform at a theater. I guess I must’ve looked wobbly because a man named Glenn stopped me and asked if I was okay and then he walked with me up a steep hill in the town of Langley. He was a retired home builder and he was so pleasant to talk to, I bought him a ticket to my show.

It’s a good show. I like it myself and other people seem to as well. It’s just me, talking, sometimes I sing a little, sometimes the crowd sings with me. I sing about the glory of the coming of the Lord and they are all there, a cappella, in harmony, astonished by how good they sound. They haven’t sung it since 9th grade and they still know all the words, even the “beauty of the lilies” and the “glory in His bosom.”

I also talk about my upbringing in the Sanctified Brethren with their mournful singing and apocalyptic preaching about the imminent end of the world when we’ll fly up to paradise, and my first paid job picking potatoes on a truck farm and dragging a heavy burlap bag of them on chill November days with a brisk wind blowing dust in my face as the farmer yelled at me that the bag wasn’t quite full, which cured me of any interest I might’ve had in hard work and also got me into the field of comedy and into the arms of the Episcopal church where the preaching is mostly about kindness and mercy.

People like this story and it happens to be true. I combine it with others that are less true. I don’t work from a script. The monologue takes some sharp turns. I toss in some poems, some jokes. I might sing the Beatles’ “I Saw Her Standing There,” which my crowd knows and they love this opportunity to sing “Oooooo” falsetto. A person seldom gets the opportunity. I do a ninety-minute show without a breath of political commentary and people are grateful for this. I even avoid words like “hump,” “bump,” “dump,” and “terrace,” “ferrous,” and “plaster of paris.”

I do have a point of view, of course. I remember that sharp sense of alarm in the taxi line at the sight of the fallen woman and the knowledge that she was alone. We are a civilized people. Don’t doubt it for a minute.

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I am finally going to get my COVID booster shot, which I postponed while I was on the road doing shows after each of which I wound up in the theater lobby commingling with the crowd, shaking hands, patting shoulders, posing for pictures, 80-year-old ladies snuggling up to me, being breathed upon, which is the proper thing to do. When people’ve spent their Saturday nights tuned to your radio show, you don’t sit locked up in a dressing room.

This is an aspect of broadcasting I never imagined when I entered the field fifty-some years ago, the affection. It wasn’t my intention to make friends; I enjoyed radio because it made me feel important, more important than I had felt as a dishwasher or a parking lot attendant. Working in the parking lot during morning rush hour, I yelled at people a lot and now, years later, they don’t come up and press the flesh.

I grew up evangelical and we weren’t huggers by nature. I see young men hugging these days and am sort of amazed. My grandson hugs me. I don’t believe I ever hugged my father or grandfather or uncles. I’m pretty sure I didn’t. But here I am in Wenatchee, Washington, the Apple Capital of the World, on the Columbia River in the Cascades, being clutched to people’s bosoms. Apparently they consider me a friend. I reciprocate but don’t understand it. And this is a fairly reddish section of the state, which means that I am probably getting hugged by some Trumpers who, were it not for radio, might rather deport me. This is fascinating stuff.

The show assiduously avoids politics. The crowd sings “America the Beautiful,” including the verse about the alabaster cities gleaming and maybe “Home on the Range,” with the verse about looking up at the stars, but listening to it you’d never get a hint that I am a radical left-wing Communist Marxist intent on destroying all that is good and true. I am only out to amuse.

I grew up with the Gospels. In the American religion of football, everything is a moral allegory, one team wanted it more, our team blew it, choked, fell apart, while the other team refused to give up, and so a coach must be fired, a player demoted, human sacrifices made. I don’t see life as allegorical, except as a joke. I don’t see this mosh pit in the lobby as a reward for hard work. I see it as God being wildly, crazily generous.

The day before Wenatchee, I had breakfast with my cousin Stan, who is 93, and his wife, Gloria — Stan who has seen more tragedy than I’ll ever know and who radiates cheerfulness. Stan’s dad abandoned the family when Stan was a kid — ran off with a schoolteacher and Stan searched for him for years and finally found him and forgave him. I could not have done that. It simply isn’t in me.

My dad bowed his head over every meal, even if it was simply Raisin Bran with sliced bananas, and thanked God for it and for His love and mercy in our lives. If we ate in a café, he maybe whispered the blessing so as not to attract attention, but we still felt grateful. And now in a theater lobby, mingling with strangers, I am dazzled by life’s generosity. It isn’t an allegory, it’s just a gift, like the apple I ate before the show, a Wenatchee apple, a fabulous apple, though I’m no judge of apples. It was awfully good.

I’m grateful for my wife and daughter, two loving and funny people in my life. I’m grateful that my ambition to do good work has stayed steady, even grown, with the years, and each show is a hill to climb, the novel waits for me to address it and each day is graded A or B or F depending on the progress I’ve made. Work is one of the great gifts of life, and the beauty of the literary life is that the work is there when you wake in the morning, you don’t have to put on a suit and tie, you just make coffee and open the laptop.

What a fine country we have. I put my arm around you, friend. I believe the noise will diminish and we will return to enjoying our liberty, including the freedom to be very grateful.

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I walked into an AT&T shop the other day and bought a new iPhone to replace my antique model and a bright young man waited on me who spoke what I’m fairly sure was English but which may as well have been Czech or Sanskrit. He asked dozens of questions to which I had no answers so he answered them himself and sold me a fine new phone that can do thousands of things, only four of which I need: to call people on the phone, to text, to read the paper, and locate the nearest drugstore. Or café. Or ATM. Or hospice, when it comes time for that.

I was once a bright young person myself. I was born because my parents couldn’t keep their hands off each other even as war was raging in Europe and they should’ve been focused on foreign policy and doing what they could for the war effort but no, they jumped into bed and made love, and out I came. I was doted on by my aunts who felt my timidity hid some profound talent. Autism hadn’t been discovered yet so I was labeled “gifted” instead.

I grew up in Minnesota where I saw my uncle Jim milk cows by hand, which cured me of any interest I had in farming or any other sort of hard work. And after breakfast he read aloud from Isaiah about the heart being corrupt and we knelt on a hard floor and prayed and it made me want to find a different church where the heart is kind and we’d kneel on cushions. Because I was no good in math or physics, I was put into shop class in high school where my carelessness around power tools terrified my teacher Mr. Buehler and he sent me to Miss Person’s speech class where, standing up and speaking, I felt Special. Very. If I wasn’t, then why were all these kids looking up at me and listening? This led to my present career as a stand-up comic and Episcopalian.

I had breakfast at Denny’s in Minot with a preacher named Barry who tried to tell me that God has a plan for my life. It was fun to be preached at over eggs and sausage and be able to talk back, which I cannot do in my Episcopal church in New York where the rector speaks from a high pulpit and I’d need to shout, which Episcos do not do in church. That is for the charismatics. We are attractive but not charismatic.

Barry was full of hope for our world and believed that each of us has an assignment from the Father to advance righteousness on Earth. This, in North Dakota, a state that will vote for a 78-year-old lunatic felon for President. But I listened to the man, impressed by his good humor, his faith in the future, though I’m not eager to know God’s plan for me. I assume it involves poverty. It usually does.

I was poor in the late Sixties and had to live rent-free in my in-laws’ basement and I don’t wish to do it again. They were sympathetic about it but it was painful coming upstairs and waiting my turn to use the bathroom. I don’t relish being pitied; I’d sort of prefer to be resented, if you want to know the truth.

I live with my wife in a two-bedroom apartment in a nice neighborhood of Manhattan from which we can look at God’s sunsets over New Jersey. Sometimes the sky darkens over there and strokes of lightning strike to show the fraudulent that God is aware of their doings. I pay for my good view by having a very nice job. I have no interest in cellar dwelling. I have other people in mind for that. Felons, for example.

God has ways of getting a person’s attention and recently I was frightened by the disappearance of my novel-in-progress from my computer hard drive but then a friend found it in a cloud where I suppose the Almighty stuck it. Since then I have been backing up religiously but you can’t outmaneuver the Lord.

Barry made an impression on me. I bathe, I floss, I do squats and sit-ups and lunges, I pray for my country that it not buy the truckloads of horse manure being peddled by dishonest felons, but there is more to be done. Meanwhile, I wait for enlightenment and drink coffee.

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I got off a Delta flight in Fargo, N.D., last week and heard a brass band playing “Over There” and found the terminal packed with hundreds of people waving flags, holding up signs, welcoming a planeload of men returning from Washington who, I was told, were veterans who’d gone to the capital to see the sights. Many of them were old guys like me, Vietnam vets, and some were younger, from the Iraq and Afghanistan era, and the crowd was very boisterous and happy as they came down the escalator and the thirty-piece band, sitting at music stands, played through “From the halls of Montezuma” and “When the caissons go rolling along” and “Off we go into the wild blue yonder” and “Anchors aweigh, my boys” and the crowd was clapping along with these old upbeat tunes about the giddy pleasure of going off to war.

Little kids got caught up in the spirit of the moment and so did I, even though it meant that my baggage took forever to show up. A woman walked over to the band and yelled, “You sound great!” which simply wasn’t true — they sounded like a bunch of middle-aged men who enjoyed playing music without having to practice regularly, but it was such a happy occasion, I had assumed at first it was for a returning victorious football team or perhaps National Guardsmen returning from a tour in Kosovo, but no, it was simply for old vets returning from a vacation trip.

It’s rare that you hear George M. Cohan’s “Over There” played these days due to the sheer stupidity of the words —

So prepare, say a prayer,
Send the word, send the word to beware
We’ll be over, we’re coming over,
And we won’t come back till it’s over, over there.

— so utterly and absurdly incongruous with the brutality of the collision of European empires in 1917, the expense of 20 million lives, men fighting in mass formations against modern weaponry, the Allied victory that laid the foundation for the Nazis and Holocaust and World War II, a dance of death, a jaunty Broadway tune celebrating masses of men dashing from trenches across open fields into bursts of machine-gun fire, all to preserve a rickety antique class of dukes with chestsful of medals and pom-poms on their hats.

To the best of my knowledge, nobody wrote a clever upbeat song about the glory of Vietnam.

Carry on, carry on,

Jim and John, greet the dawn, weapons drawn,

Don’t be slow, off we go to Saigon.

 I speak as a draft dodger. I was ordered to report and did not and never paid a price for it. I have told this to men who served in Vietnam and they said, “You did the right thing.” A cousin who served there wrote back: “Do whatever you need to do to avoid coming here.” Some people had hangnails, some got a psychiatrist’s excuse, some dropped acid before the interview, some joined the Guard. I knew people who went and all these years later it’s clear how it messed up their lives. They came back torn in invisible ways, having seen friends killed in a stupid war to uphold the reputations of dishonest politicians. Look at the Pentagon Papers that Daniel Ellsberg smuggled out to the press, detailing the dishonesty of our government to its own citizens.

The people at the airport were having a party out of affection for their uncles and brothers, and that’s a sweet thing. But I saw some ancient vets in wheelchairs who seemed confused by the cheering and a little worried about how they’d find a ride home.

I know people who live in Ho Chi Minh City and have a nice life there and it seems that the communism we sent men to Vietnam to fight turns out to be simply another impenetrable bureaucracy in which, like the Cosa Nostra or the Republican Party, it helps to know the right people and say the right things at all times without exception.

I was ordered by my government to report for basic training and I violated the law of the land and I got away with it and in fact thrived mightily, and men I knew obeyed the law and suffered horribly for it.

A couple nights later, I did a show at an amphitheater nearby and 600 people stood and sang “America the Beautiful” and the Battle Hymn of the Republic a cappella as the sun went down. They sounded fabulous. It’s a great country, folks. But what strange times.

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I am a morning person, it is when I do my best work, and it took me until I was 40 to realize this plain fact, which is a shame, I being 82 now, which is why I intend to live to be 97 as my mother did, so I won’t have wasted half my life, only two/fifths. I spent twenty years trying to be an evening person by downing a glass of Scotch and then a glass of wine or two or three so as to be charming and witty, but for Christians glamor and wittiness is a steep and rocky path, we are meant to be productive, but the hangover from the Scotch and wine clouded my mornings and made my writing dark and ironic like Kafka’s, stories of hopeless struggle against a mysterious fate, which I don’t believe, I believe in redemption.

I quit drinking by quitting it. I didn’t want to spend a couple weeks in treatment at Alky Camp dealing with my underlying problems, I just wanted to ditch the Scotch so I did. I drank ginger ale instead. I also stopped smoking one day. I’d been a chain-smoker because I thought that’s what writers do, but all I really enjoyed was lighting the cigarette and exhaling, the inhaling part made me feel bad, so I stopped. I kept a pencil in my pocket and if I needed to, I stuck it in my mouth.

Every morning I remember how bad I used to feel and how good I feel now. It’s a good way to begin the day. Sunday was glorious in Manhattan and I had my coffee, avoiding the Times, which would only scare me badly, and after looking around for my glasses, which, as it turned out, were parked on my head, I hiked to church for the 10 a.m. service, scootched into the pew, prayed for Kamala who carries our hope for decency in America, and then heard the organist Brother John strike up “Just A Closer Walk With Thee,” odd for an Episcopal service, in a very danceable tempo.

I love this about my church, we often come to the verge of euphoria but being Anglican we resist, we suppress wild euphoria to produce a quiet joy, not like the charismatic sects who raise their arms in the air and dance around and speak in tongues, but some people speak better in tongues than others, French people for example and Chinese, so it turns show-offy and makes the less euphoric and monolingual feel inferior, whereas we Episcopalians remain seated and simply feel giddy and very very happy. We confess our sins, such as failing to RSVP promptly to invitations and not attending a seminal play by an important playwright though we know seminal things are good for us, and then we shake hands and wish each other Peace, and we sing “Leaning On The Everlasting Arms,” which makes me think of my aunts, and I shake hands with the minister and walk down Amsterdam past the Hispanic Catholic church just letting out.

I stop at Trader Joe’s and buy salad makings and coffee and cereal, bread and cheese, frozen mac and cheese, and get in line with couples with kids in strollers and old guys and young women with witty T-shirts, and head for home past lunchers in sidewalk cafés and fruit vendors and bikes whizzing past.

I love New York City. I’m a Minnesotan, I’m an alien here, but after this year I know that America is not my country anymore. There is no argument about this. Any country in which Donald J. Trump is a serious candidate for Chief Magistrate is not my country. So no matter the result of the election, I plan to stop reading the news and live in my immediate surroundings, my neighbors, my church, the folks on the subway, the kids studying in the library, the walkers in the park. Mr. Trump is an old joke in New York. He couldn’t get elected garbage inspector. Only in the Midwest and South is he a power. So it’s their country and they can do with it what they will. I’m 82 and I plan to enjoy the rest of my life and if he uses the Army to deport ten million people and lets Putin reassemble the Soviet Union and jails Joe Biden and cuts billions in funding of public schools, that is for the New York Times to worry about, not me.

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