Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 12

I went up the coast of Maine last week and came across a wonderful little café and it was so good I pulled out my pad and pen and sat writing for a couple hours. I like to write with people nearby but not involved with me personally. The waitress was all business, she greeted me by saying, “Yeah?”

I asked if they served lunch. She said, “Yeah. Take a seat.”

I’d had a bad encounter with a lobster roll the day before so I ordered a garden salad and a grilled cheese. “With chicken or crab?” she said. I said, “Crab.” Crab is not lobster.

The salad was fresh. Greens, tomato chunks, slices of cucumber. Croutons. But fresh, not shipped in cellophane bags from Croatia. And the sandwich was just fine. And so was the blueberry pie à la mode.

What I loved though wasn’t the food but the ambience. I sat in the dark interior looking out an open door to a bright sunny boardwalk and marina and the Atlantic. Younger people sat under an awning out there. My generation, indoors. The customers were stocky people, good eaters, shorts and sneakers. A chorus of children’s voices from a kiddie area about 30 feet away. Kids eat fast and then want to hang with other kids and they were busy jousting and teasing, squealing, playing with puzzles, while the grown-ups sat at tables and conversed and I sat looking out the door, aware that I was in a crowded room of happy Americans enjoying lunch, children shrieking, infants tossing out syllables, parents declaiming or describing their day, the light laughter of women, and out the door the basso rumble of boats’ engines, heading out of harbor. To listen to crowd vocalization, like musical notes, flutes, bassoons, violas, a few violins, a composition titled “Lunch Hour,” simultaneous happy talk, I felt uplifted.

It made me imagine the mood has lifted in this country and the plague of MAGA is passing, people are sick of the insults and the self-pity and the massive naked ego, and Democrats have found happiness and are leading the tourists in that direction.

The accusation that Kamala is antisemitic for having passed over Shapiro for v-p, ignores the fact that her husband is Jewish. The attack on Walz that he shirked his duty, a man who served in the National Guard for 24 years, is ridiculous coming from Mr. Bone Spurs. This guy needs to start attending his own briefings.

This is one of the happiest summers of my very long life. My wife installed WhatsApp on my phone and it dings and I pick up and she talks to me from the wine country of Portugal where she’s hiking with her brother and his wife, on their way to a baptism and pig roast. Sometimes my daughter comes on and says, “Make me laugh,” so I tell her about the woman at Yellowstone Park who was chased by a bear and the park rangers arrested her for running with a bear behind. She laughs.

I’m an old man, I have no ambition whatsoever but I love my work. I do 90 minutes of stand-up, I go back to the hotel and work on my novel, and in the morning I repeat it. The audience laughs a lot and then I have hours of pure silence occasionally interrupted by the voice of the woman I love lying in her hotel room in a heat wave in Portugal and recounting her days’ adventures. Or my little girl needing a joke. So a woman was hit by a car and lay in the street bleeding and someone yelled, “Call a priest!” The woman said, “No, I’m Unitarian.” Someone yelled, “Then call a math teacher.”

According to the actuarial tables I am coming within sight of the end of my life, so why do I feel I am just hitting my stride? On my 82nd birthday last week, I got a video of my high school gym teacher Stan Nelson wishing me a happy birthday. Stan is 103, almost 104. Stan was a landing officer on an LST at Omaha Beach that horrible day in 1944 when young men did their part to save European civilization, and here he is, smiling, speaking clearly, greeting one of his worst pupils. What a beautiful world we live in.

I see that happiness in Kamala’s face, waving to the crowd. Jamaican, East Indian, born to people who came here for opportunity, and this bright well-spoken woman with a big sense of humor and no self-pity has made millions of us look forward to autumn. Our country, sweet land of possibility.

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Mon Dieu! Mille Félicitations to you French for the merveilleux et excitant Paris Olympics, and many thanks to YouTube (or Toi Tube) for the nightly highlights (points forts). An old man doesn’t have hours to spend whilst commentators kill time and runners warm up for the 1,500-meter, just shoot me the juice, Bruce, and show me the Olympic break-dancing gold medal taken by a Canadian — a Canadian ! — and, okay, he’s a Korean-Canadian, Philip Kim, but Olympic break-dancing? B-boys and B-girls spinning and twisting and doing impossible physical feats. And the USA’s Suni Lee doing the twisting vault routine that needs to be seen in slow motion several times to be believed.

I am 82 and, for me, trotting around the block would be an Olympic event. So to see the Swedish pole-vaulter Duplantis perform the ridiculous feat of lofting himself feet-first with the rubbery pole and squiggle over the crossbar is like watching a man climb up a brick wall — it’s surreal, it has no relevance to life on this planet today.

Much more relevant is the 4×100 women’s relay. Back in my day we looked down on fast women but these women are unbelievably swift and the art of handing the baton at full speed to your galloping teammate is a wonder to behold. And what about the 1,500-meter men’s and the two leaders jawing at each other almost to the end when the USA’s Cole Hocker suddenly came racing from back in the pack to win by a couple feet?

Thank goodness the Americans won men’s basketball over the French. It’s our game, Americans invented it. To lose would be like English Sauvignon Blanc beating out French. Some English wines have beaten out French in blind tests but who says vision-impaired persons are experts on wine?

My event is the old man’s 90-minute stand-up storytelling with some poems tossed in and my routine had an intelligent dog, a girl challenging a boy to wrestle, Babe Ruth, a funeral, and the audience singing “America,” “In My Life,” and “My Girl.” It kept the crowd’s attention pretty well.

It was a good week. I did my show every night and all day I sat working on a novel and loved doing it. I have writer friends who’re unable to write so much as a thank-you note because they once wrote a book hailed by heavyweight critics as heralding a new era in American literature. Nobody ever said that sort of thing about me. The most I’ve gotten was “amusing yet often poignant.” That’s not a pedestal; it’s a low curb.

I traveled around doing my show, feeling free as a bird. I grew up the middle child in a big family and so I could ride away on my bike and not be missed and that’s when I discovered freedom. I was ten when I rode into downtown Minneapolis alone past factories and through the red-light district to the downtown library and sat reading books my evangelical parents disapproved of, Hemingway and Mencken and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and nobody tried to stop me.

And now I walked out onstage and sang:

I’ve had many wonderful teachers,

I’ve had more than my share of good breaks,

And thanks to modern medical procedures,

I’ve outlived all my worse mistakes.

I’m not one of the Olympic winners;

I just do what I need to do.

But thanks to surgeons and blood thinners,

I’ve reached the age of 82.

One story I decided not to tell in my show was about the helicopter ride I took with a famous New York model who had dated Donald Trump and it ran into instrument failure over New Jersey and had to make an emergency landing in a swamp, a very dramatic near-death moment, both of us thinking the end was near, and during this emotional moment she told me that Trump eats with his fingers and spills food on himself and is functionally illiterate and has a poor grasp of multiplication and division and she told me other things about him such as the fact that he has a vocal resonator implanted in his neck to make his voice boomy, and without it he has a voice like that of a ten-year-old girl, but who am I to judge? We each have our own limitations. I couldn’t do a pole vault if you put a gun to my head. So don’t.

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Malmberg was an ‘amazing and interesting character for being, you know, a quiet Swede,’ Garrison Keillor said
By MARY DIVINE | [email protected] | Pioneer Press

Obituary: Marine on St. Croix’s Ralph Malmberg, the inspiration for ‘Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery’

Ralph Malmberg, the former longtime owner of the Marine General Store in Marine on St. Croix, never set out to be famous.
But one of Malmberg’s frequent customers was radio broadcaster Garrison Keillor, who lived in Marine on St. Croix from 1977 to 1980. Malmberg was often mentioned in Keillor’s “News from Lake Wobegon” monologues on his weekly radio show, “A Prairie Home Companion.”

Ralph Malmberg outside the Marine General Store in Marine on St. Croix.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Malmberg died Aug. 6 of complications related to Alzheimer’s disease at Croixdale in Bayport. He was 90. (Courtesy of Jennifer Malmberg Henry)

“The name ‘Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery’ I stole from my landlady, Judy Wilcox, who was a good friend of Ralph and Marian Malmberg,” Keillor said Monday. “She also gave me the motto ‘If you can’t find it at Ralph’s, you can probably get along without it.’ That was her joke. Neither one was mine. I simply used them for 50 years.”

Keillor said he last mentioned “Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery” and the slogan during a show on Friday night in Concord, N.H. “And it got the same reliable laugh. Not a guffaw, but a healthy laugh of recognition. I deserve no credit for it; Judy Wilcox gets that.”

Malmberg, who owned the store from 1961 to 1982, was an “amazing and interesting character for being, you know, a quiet Swede,” Keillor said. “That store was the heart of Marine on St. Croix.”

Malmberg, of Marine on St. Croix, never knew when the store would get a cameo on the radio show. Keillor once told a story about the store’s new “foot vibrator.”

“I had all my compressors in the basement, and it got very hot there in the summertime, so I installed a big circulating exhaust fan, and I hung it on the rafters near the produce counter,” Malmberg told a Swedish TV program in 2011. “When I ran that fan, it vibrated the floor quite a bit. Garrison walked in, and he was pacing back and forth and standing in front of that produce counter. I didn’t really think about it. The next day, he remarked on the air about the new foot vibrator that Ralph had installed, and that the people should come there after working hard and get their feet massaged.”

‘Wanted to work for himself’

 

 

 

 

An undated photo of the Marine General Store when it was owned by Ralph Malmberg. It was built in 1870 as a company store for a lumber company. (Courtesy of Marine General Store)

The white clapboard store, built in 1870 as a company store for a lumber company, is a landmark in northern Washington County, known as much for its original wood floor and counter as for its in-house deli and bakery.
Malmberg discovered that the store – then owned by the Strand family – was for sale during a sales call to the store in 1961, said Andrew Malmberg, Malmberg’s son.

Ralph Malmberg was selling trading stamps for Business Incentives at the time, “but he was looking for a business to buy because he wanted to work for himself,” Malmberg said. “He wanted to get out of Minneapolis. He wanted to try living in a small town, and the store came up and that’s kind of all she wrote.”

Malmberg grew up in Minneapolis and graduated from North High School. He studied mortuary science at the University of Minnesota, but later graduated with an associate degree in business from the U, said Jennifer Malmberg Henry, Malmberg’s daughter.

He met Marian Wicker, who was studying education at the U, through mutual friends from North Minneapolis, Jennifer Henry said. The couple married in 1959 at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Minneapolis. They had three children.

Malmberg, who became the town’s butcher after he purchased the store, was especially proud of the store’s meat department. When he bought the store, there was still a chicken coop in the back – where the Nita Mae’s Scoop ice cream shop is now located, Jennifer Henry said.

Other endeavors

Malmberg expanded into other businesses as well. An avid cross-country skier, he opened a ski shop above the Marine General Store, where he sold skis and his own brand of Malmberg 3-pin bindings and a wax scraper he had invented, Andrew Malmberg said.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ralph Malmberg inside the Marine General Store, which he formerly owned, in Marine on St. Croix in 2009. Malmberg died Aug. 6 at the age of 90. (Courtesy of Andy Kramer)

“He loved skiing,” he said. “He liked to compete. He was in a lot of ski races, and he liked to be outside.”
Malmberg was the founder of the Marine O’Brien Ski Race, a race from the Marine Elementary School to William O’Brien State Park. The race celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2022. The race, a fundraiser for the St. Croix Valley Ski Club youth-skiing program, includes 12.5 km and 25 km classic and skate races and a 6 km wood ski race.

Ralph and Marian Malmberg also ran an airline crew specialty store and founded the Marine Messenger, the predecessor of the Country Messenger. The free weekly newspaper, which started as a grocery store broadsheet, was published in the basement of the store.

“It had sale information, special information, they called it ‘gossip,’” Jennifer Henry said. “They expanded into local events, anniversaries, graduations, church events, news about the fire department, you name it. She wrote it by hand and then printed it out or used a typewriter and cut it out. She would literally use glue sticks to put it all together. She would stay up until 3 o’clock in the morning doing it.”

The Malmbergs “weren’t afraid to start new things,” said Gwen Roden, the store’s longtime manager. “He had an Episcopal church in the office area upstairs for a time as well. When the church left, he rented skis and the first VHS videos.”

When Ralph Malmberg would get an idea, “he would just march forward with it,” Henry said. “Because his personality was so palatable to everyone, he could just get people to help him make things happen. He could really get people to rally. He was quiet, but very friendly.”

Employed local youth

The Marine General Store was the first employer for many of the youth in Marine, Roden said. “He was fair, and he was funny,” she said. “He had a great sense of humor. He employed every kid who grew up in Marine and taught us how to work.”

“For scores of young people, it was where they learned good manners, how to deal with customers, reliability, cleanliness, the list goes on,” Keillor said. “It was like Junior Achievement. It was a forum for young entrepreneurs, and they went on to other things.”

Henry said her father had high expectations of his employees. “They learned so much from him,” she said. “He let them do a lot. He was willing to give them a lot of responsibility and trusted them.”

In 1982, Malmberg sold the store to Dan and Sue Pruden, who had worked in the grocery business in Forest Lake.

Andy and Karen Kramer, who owned the store from 2005 to 2015, said Malmberg loved sharing stories about his time at the store. “He said Garrison came in one day and was looking around and said, ‘Ralph, I don’t suppose you have any capers, do you?’ And Ralph looks at him and says, ‘What’s a caper?’” Andy Kramer said.

“When Ralph was telling us that story, I told him, ‘Well we have capers in the store now!’ and I showed him where they were,” she said. “He chuckled and thought that was kind of amazing.”

Lake Wobegon character

In the 2011 interview with the Swedish TV station, Malmberg said he could often picture himself in Keillor’s on-air stories.
“I think when he’s talking about the Lake Wobegon story and the character he’s talking about, I think people kind of fit themselves into that and dream along,” he said. “I know I do when I listen to him.”

Malmberg loved Keillor and listened to the show religiously, Andy Malmberg said. As for being a featured part of the show, “he kind of ate it up, but he was a real humble guy,” he said. “He didn’t make a big deal of it. Mr. Keillor would come in and he would talk to him. He was just a regular friend of his.”

Malmberg was preceded death by his wife, Marian, and daughter Elizabeth. In addition to his son and daughter, he is survived by two grandchildren and a great-grandson.

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A dear friend once said to me out of the blue, “Today it will have been forty years since the last time I vomited,” and I said to her, “How do you celebrate an anniversary like that?” It was a witty moment, one of many in our friendship, and if we’d only collected them all, we could sit down and write a Cole Porter musical, but we didn’t and anyway Cole Porter isn’t so hip anymore and we’re busy doing other things.

I, for one, have been on a tour doing a one-man show and having a great time until last week in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, after a dinner of six oysters on the half shell, clam chowder, and a lobster roll, I awoke at 4 a.m. feeling sick to my stomach and headed for the bathroom.

You can continue reading; there was no regurgitation, just a strong impulse in that direction, but I stilled the impulse by (1) remaining very still, (2) thinking of other things, and (3) finding the packet of Alka-Seltzer I’ve had in my briefcase for at least a decade waiting for just this occasion. The other things I thought of were Kamala Harris and how steadily she would deal with this sort of situation, and the show I’d do that evening and whether I should mention vomiting in a humorous way, and my wife, who’d flown the night before to Lisbon to attend a great-nephew’s baptism at his grandparents’ farm where a hundred villagers would gather for a huge pig roast. Roast pig is something my beloved would not ingest or venture near lest she should suddenly need to be alone for a while.

What I conclude from this is a profound truth: each of us has his or her limitations and it is noble to venture beyond them but in the end — I say this as a newly minted 82-year-old: Be Who You Are And Not Who You Ain’t. I am a Minnesotan. I grew up in a home with a half-acre garden; we ate fresh vegetables. Now and then, Dad bought a few chickens from a farmer and we slaughtered them in the yard. We ate the flesh of critters who walked on legs and fish that swam in the lakes. We also ate Chicken of the Sea tuna. But we didn’t eat critters who crawl along the bottom. We were not bottom-feeders.

I have many bottom-feeding friends. I also have a friend who supports RFK Jr. for president, which to me is like eating earthworms. We just don’t talk about it. I have atheist friends though they don’t announce the fact for fear I’d say, “The problem with atheism is who do you cry out to when you’re having orgasm?” and they’ve heard that joke before. And I have several friends who think that ripping a lobster apart and gouging its flesh out with a fork is one of life’s great delights, one reserved for sophisticates like themselves, a higher order than the hamburger crowd.

I like hamburgers. I went into a McDonald’s the other day and ordered a Double Quarter Pounder and thought it was good. At McDonald’s you do not have the carcass of the cow on a spit by the drive-up window, the eyes glazed, the tail hanging down, and the workers don’t gouge the meat from the cow’s rib cage. The hamburger is handed to you wrapped in paper. So after my night in Maine, I believe I will stop my quest for sophistication and be myself, an old man of the prairie. If I hadn’t read A.J. Liebling in the eighth grade and set out to write like him, I could’ve become a small-town teacher and coach like Tim Walz and been quite satisfied with my life.

Governor Walz is a straight shooter. A mob of armed right-wingers gathered at the governor’s mansion once in 2020 and Mr. Walz called up President Trump at the White House and asked him to talk to the governor’s daughter who was frightened and Mr. Trump, to his credit, did. When Mr. Walz takes office in Washington and the Walz family moves into the mansion at the Naval Observatory, I believe that even as he sits in meetings regarding national security and Ukraine and Gaza and the warming of the planet, he will remember his days as a high school teacher when he had to supervise the lunchroom. Speaking of which, I recommend a tuna salad sandwich and a tomato and cucumber salad and a Fudgsicle for dessert. It’s good.

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Ten blissful days driving around New England doing a one-man show in small towns and it’s not easy to write about bliss but one should try, especially since I write so kvetchingly about misery and annoyance.

What makes it blissful is that I’m not in charge. My wife took away the car keys long ago and it turns out to be a pleasure. In a few months, Joe Biden will experience this. He’ll go back to Rehoboth Beach and play Scrabble and finally have time to read Dickens. I was a boss for years and I still remember the dimwit things I did, but now, with my road manager Janis Kaiser at the wheel and making all the decisions, I am in the blessed position of passenger, just like when I was ten, looking out the window, watching the world go by. She drives through Connecticut into Massachusetts, four-lane highways lacing through deep forests, and suddenly we’re in torrential rain, the wipers slapping, we’re passing giant semitrailers, blasting through puddles, and it’s all a travelogue movie to me: she keeps us on schedule, I sit and take it all in and my mind wanders. We slow down and motor through a town of brick storefronts right out of the late 19th century, we pass a herd of Holsteins, we come into a traffic jam caused by a flock of geese casually crossing the highway, it’s one lovely moment after another.

We can talk or not, as we like. She grew up Norwegian in Brooklyn, has been in theater, is a sailor, has worked in big corporations, is tech-savvy, so she knows plenty that I don’t. I talk on the phone to my wife, who misses me in New York but she’s okay and I feel cleansed, transformed, in the role of octogenarian stand-up. And after every show, shaking hands out on the street, people congratulate me on Kamala Harris’s choice of Tim Walz as a running mate, as if I had something to do with it.

I hosted a fundraiser for him at my house in St. Paul when he ran for governor and was impressed — the guy taught high school so he knows how to talk to people whose minds are elsewhere and persuade them to wake up and take an interest. He’s the perfect guy for the job. If people think of Democrats as unhappy childless cat ladies, Tim can tell them it’s more about providing free meals to schoolkids and college to people who can’t afford to pay tuition. Nonetheless, he coached football and is a hunter. He makes Minnesota proud. I even wrote a limerick.

Kamala just picked Tim Walz,

A Lutheran in coveralls

Who grew up on a farm, he

Did time in the Army,

And I’ll bet he has plenty of courage.

When we elect President Harris, I think many men are going to feel a sense of relief, seeing a satirical cartoon character who exemplifies male bragging and bluster and B.S. at its over-the-top worst go back to Mirage-of-Long-Ago or maybe fly off to Saudi Arabia to avoid prosecution.

We don’t talk politics in the car. We soak up the beauty of the landscape, the rainstorms, the little towns of Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, New York, the Main Streets of brick storefronts, and we appreciate GPS, a gift of Big Government and the friendly voice that steers us through the unfamiliar maze of roadways.

One beauty of GPS is its service to small independent entrepreneurs. Looking for a place to have lunch? You type in “café” on your phone and in addition to McDonald’s and Domino’s, it’ll give you the little Thai café and Joe’s BBQ and Mama Giovanni’s and Mickey’s Diner, saving enterprising businesspeople big bucks on ads and billboards.

Tim Walz is a man of the heartland and when J.D. Vance of Yale described him as a San Francisco liberal, it had the tone of desperation, same as if Walz were to call Vance a “hillbilly.” If a venture capitalist from the Ohio suburbs can be a hillbilly, then I am Taylor Swift.

I am not well-tailored, nor am I so swift. But I do write a good limerick.

I’m at Boothbay Harbor up in Maine

On a tour and feeling no pain.

I’ve turned 82

And still do what I do,

Standing up, with a heart and a brain.

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I did something last Sunday I’d never done before in my 82 years. I went to a café on the main drag of Keene, New Hampshire, and I could hear my wife say, though she was five hundred miles away, “Wash your hands before you eat, you’ve been shaking hands with a hundred people,” so I walked to the rear of the café and found the men’s room door locked. A waitperson nearby, what we once called a “waitress,” said, “Use the ladies’.” I looked at her aghast. “Go ahead, we do it all the time,” she said. “Yes, but you’re a lady,” I said. She laughed. She said, “Go ahead, it’s no problem.” I waited a minute. She laughed at my timidity. The guy in the men’s must’ve been doing his eye makeup. So I went into the ladies’. (That’s not my term; that was the word on the door.) It was a regular toilet, except with no urinal. I put the seat up, aimed very carefully, then flushed, washed my hands, and emerged. A woman stood there waiting. She was more my age than the waitperson’s. She looked at me somewhat severely. I wanted to explain but didn’t know how. (“I was told to go in there”? It sounds sheepish, even shamefaced.)

I’ve been at the Metropolitan Opera during intermission when women standing in a long line at the Women’s broke out of line and stalked into the Men’s, no waiting, and, I assume, went into a stall and did what needed to be done, and if a man had stared at them afterward, they would’ve said, “What’s your problem?” But I’m not a New Yorker.

I’d shaken hands on the sidewalk outside the opera house in Bellows Falls, Vermont, not far away, where I did a show. It was just me and the stage was so big, I decided to stand down among the customers, which the lighting guy didn’t like, having arranged the stage lighting, but I made my career in radio for a reason — I look like a security guy who wandered out by mistake — and when you are 82, nobody argues with you for fear of causing a seizure. It was pleasant being in their midst, especially when I got them to sing. I told them, “This is an ugly election year when half of the people believe the other half is crazy, so let’s stand and sing together in the park, no matter what you think,” and they sang about the land where our fathers died and the spacious skies and the fateful lightning and the terrible swift sword, and it was rather thrilling.

I’m an old Democrat, a member of the party of childless cat ladies who are miserable about their own lives and want to make other people miserable too, but I do not like that schools have removed “America” and the pledge of allegiance from the classroom, I am in favor of strict standards of behavior in school, a dress code, and I believe that good manners are essential to a civil society. I could go on.

The world I grew up in is fading fast. Thanks to the internet, parents don’t hold sway over their children’s minds. Curiosity is a powerful natural urge and censorship died when Wi-Fi came in. You can burn books; you can’t burn radio waves. So everything has suddenly come under question.

What remains powerful is love. My parents loved each other dearly and I witnessed this and it remains large in my life. When I was six, I was a slow reader — when you’ve grown up trying to read Hezekiah and Jeremiah, it does crimp your style — and my teacher Estelle Shaver noticed and kept me after school to read aloud to her from Dick and Jane. When Bill the janitor came in to empty the wastebaskets, she said, “Listen to this boy, Bill. Doesn’t he have a wonderful voice? He’s entertaining me while I’m correcting workbooks.” It was remedial reading but she made it feel like a privilege and this act of kindness sticks with me. Call me naïve but I think marvelous feats can be accomplished by small acts of kindness.

The country is moving toward electing a woman president and I am touched by how presidential she looks, her warmth, her gracefulness, how she can converse with a crowd, how she ignores the insults and the bellowing of walruses, and speaks in clipped sentences about the future of the country. This will be a first in my life and I’m looking forward.

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What a world of marvels we live in. I sit with my daughter at night on a terrace under a birch tree looking out at the lights of Manhattan and I take my phone and shoot a video scanning the city lights and text it to a friend facing surgery in Minnesota who is in isolation, her immune system compromised by chemo. She is Catholic so I also send her a joke about the priest and the Baptist sitting together on the plane. The priest orders a glass of wine, the Baptist a 7-Up. The Baptist says , “Christians should not touch alcohol,” and the priest says, “Jesus drank wine.” The Baptist says, “Yes, and I’d have thought better of him if he hadn’t.” All this with a gizmo the size of half a sandwich. No wonder young people love it so much.

I’m of the ancient pen-and-ink-on-stationery era and I like to write limericks to friends such as an Episcopal priest facing surgery:

To Laura our associate rector

As doctors prepare to dissect her,

Life can be risky

For a reverent Piskie,

And I pray that God will protect her,

And that the procedure

Won’t harm her great feature,

Her joyful humor detector.

But this little sandwich in my pocket is a great tool of friendship. A friend is someone you can call up for no specific reason and just exchange thoughts for ten or fifteen minutes. A high school classmate on Bainbridge Island, a friend in the Presidio whose late mother I’m making a character in my new novel, a friend on 105th Street who wants to write a book and I give him two specific encouraging pieces of advice, my sister in Minneapolis to offer a morsel of family history.

Two days ago I was up in Connecticut, sitting on the front porch of an old white house at 5 a.m., my favorite time of day, looking out at the river in the pale light, a fine time to think and also to pray silently for people I know. I don’t tell God what they need, He knows, and I don’t work from a list, I simply see them walk through my mind, my grandson and his girlfriend, my daughter and son and stepdaughter, my wife, my sister, some cousins, the couple next door, my nephew and his wife and their baby, Kamala Harris, some cousins, my colleagues — I hold them in my mind, touch them, and move on. I pray because I am not a good person, I have abandoned people I love again and again and thrown myself into my work, the treachery of ambition. But God hears the prayers of a sinner, I believe.

I am a lucky man so I don’t pray for myself. In a few days I set out on a ten-day tour as an octogenarian stand-up, playing theaters here and there, doing a 75- or 90-minute set, all from memory, which is an excellent way to keep dementia at bay. A man gets careless late in life and when you walk out into bright light and 400 people applaud, it focuses your mind. I was brought up Sanctified Brethren, a judgmental branch of the faith, and I feel blessed to be in comedy, my job to make strangers happy, maybe even delighted, and you can feel it when you accomplish this. It’s unlike other jobs in this regard. During this tour, I will turn 82 and that’s why I’m hitting the road. I want to spend my birthday doing a show. I don’t want to sit at a long table with other elderly people, each with a medical history to share, as someone wheels in a bonfire of a cake and we sit and eat angel food and melted wax and someone tells me some interesting facts about prostate cancer.

I was brought up by Midwestern stoics who drummed the lesson into us: Don’t think you’re somebody because you’re not. You’re not so smart as you think. You’re the same as everybody else. So buckle down and get your work done and don’t fall behind. So I turned into a hard worker. But sitting on this terrace at night with my daughter, and then my wife comes out with her glass of wine, this sandwich putting my friends within easy reach, it is clear to this old Episcopalian, God’s great generosity, how much He loves us, to give us this summer night. In this ugly election year, let us be good for each other.

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I’ve been on a solid high ever since July 21 when I was sitting in a café on South Wabash in Chicago, the El rumbling overhead, and the word came that Joe Biden had stepped out of the race and that Democrats now could find a candidate who demonstrates energy and acuity and passion and is not simply trying to pronounce all his words clearly. I know this sounds cruel but I am Joe’s age and he makes 81 seem like senescence whereas it can be, given good genes and fine pharmaceuticals and some luck, a beautiful chapter of life.

I read the bulletin on my phone and looked around the café packed with people of many shades, and for all I’ve heard about us living in a Third World country, it didn’t look that way to me at all. Chicago is the city of Oprah and Saul Bellow, John Belushi, Mavis Staples, Studs Terkel, where the Rolling Stones made a pilgrimage to see Muddy Waters, which tells me that America is Great and has been for a very long time and people who don’t know that are in need of assistance.

I’d had a bad case of Biden blues imagining that the Con Man might get reelected but Nancy Pelosi took away Joe’s car keys and though it got breathless coverage on the news, to me, an old man who gave up the car keys years ago, it seemed perfectly ordinary. Why punish yourself, trudging through the sludge on the campaign trail? Go home and read French novels and be less miserable.

That was then and since then a miracle has happened: Democrats became a party united in happiness, something we are unaccustomed to. Joe had the presence of mind to declare for his v-p who had remained in the background for three years, as a good v-p should, and in about 48 hours everybody and their cousin fell in love with Kamala Harris and a hundred million bucks flowed in and suddenly Democrats were in the news again. Talk about a fresh face — she looked rather fabulous. A smart woman, well-spoken, ebullient, a person who, unlike the Con, Actually Likes People and who has the flashiest smile in politics today. Mr. Golf Pants has a smirk and a scowl but he couldn’t smile if you turned him upside down and jiggled him. And all week I was getting joyful phone calls from old libs who haven’t been this happy since Barack and Michelle and those two little girls walked out in front of a big Chicago crowd in Grant Park on Election Night, 2008. It was like Baptists having a glass of wine and music is playing and suddenly you’re dancing with your wife. Suddenly Donald Trump’s worst dream comes true: he’s facing a woman prosecutor.

Somewhere, a Republican behavioral consultant has been telling Mr. Trump to be careful insulting a mature woman of color, especially if you’re a convicted felon. Thanks to him, many of his supporters have died from COVID and a new generation has sprung up. If Taylor Swift says the word “Kamala” or a word like it — “comely,” “homily,” “stamina” — this election is over. Young women are going to use GPS to get them to the voting booth and they’ll take selfies in it and maybe do a podcast but they’ll check the boxes marked D for decency and after 250 years we’ll have ourselves a woman in the Oval Office doing the big stuff and her guy can pour tea for visiting dignitaries and celebrate Volunteer Week.

In the Senate Judiciary Committee, it was Kamala who made Brett Kavanaugh choke on his chaw when she asked, “Can you think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?” She was talking about abortion, but actually there are many such laws, the ones that give the government the right to throw your ass in jail, and that’s why DT is running for office, to make the indictments disappear. Suddenly on July 21st, he felt very much older. And with Sleepy Joe benched, people are going to notice that Mr. Trump loves 130-word sentences with no discernable subject or predicate. Vanity prevents him from wearing glasses so he can’t read the teleprompter and so he keeps giving the same 90-minute rant.

I guess this is what it takes to elect a female president, run an adolescent crook against her. Well, whatever. Taylor, do your duty and wear a Harris button and let’s get this done.

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I have been a very happy Democrat for the past week and I am not used to this. I’m used to reading about homelessness, hungry children, the pollution by plastics, the warming of the oceans, various daily examples of injustice and cruelty and suffering, but now, even though I am an old Episcopalian writer, I am in love, I’ve been Kamalized. The nation was sunk in depression over a contest between two old white men, one weird and maniacal, the other murmury, and we were praying for a fresh face to come onstage, but who? And then the news flash: Joe withdrew. Another flash: he endorsed Kamala Harris. And suddenly politics, which had been the same old sameness of similitude glaciating toward November 5, became a fascinating story. There was a good reason to read the paper. A smart articulate friendly woman who laughs and who smiles spontaneously and when Oval Orange came out and called her a lunatic and said she’d destroy the country, it made no sense, not even to his elderly biker fans with the white hair ropes coming out of their skulls. It only made O.O. weirder. It made me feel high. Harris vs. the Harasser starts to look like an unfair contest. She’s got a future, he’s only got a troubled past.

I am not used to feeling this way — my people expecting the worst. When happiness struck, they took this as a sign of imminent catastrophe. But Kamala looks to me like a sunny day after a year of trumpification and when she vows to eliminate child hunger in America, she is striking a chord that reverberates left and right. The right of every child to get a decent healthy start in life, no matter the iniquities or carelessness of the parents. Not even the man Senator Vance called “America’s Hitler” can argue with that. And the visual contrast between her and Herr Trump is stunning. A 16-month-old child can see the difference: Angelina Jolie vs. Thor the Avenger.

Everyone in the MAGA camp knows that their man is a first-class pompous jerk who you’d never want to go on a long car trip with. What sort of man would make his teenage granddaughter get up on national TV to say that he is a nice man? And what sort of man would find his granddaughter’s endorsement necessary? Not a nice man.

As for Joe’s 11-minute speech to the nation last Wednesday, it was his chance to tell a story and instead he reeled off a list of accomplishments like he was listing furniture consignments up for auction. no emotion, a deficit of charisma. Joe is a creature of the old gents’ club known as the U.S. Senate and so Trump is incomprehensible to him. Kamala Harris has Mr. Golf Pants nailed: he’s a crook and he’s a champion liar. Every time he stands up, he lies. When it was a contest between two old white men, Trump could sort of pass for human, but Kamala has charisma and she makes him look like an old snapping turtle. I hope she has some good writers. Trump has but they’re wasted because he can’t read. Kamala’s strong suit is her humanity, a quality that Trump never had. He stands next to his youngest son and never puts an arm around him, it’s like they never met. The kid’s misery is painful to see. Kamala is a hugger. She needs to give speeches that sound like a person conversing, not the reading of a mortgage.

I look forward to the First Woman President and wish I could live long enough to see the second and third. Why? I think the FWP could prove to be good and great in ways the MPs never imagined. I think it would be inspiring to my daughter and my great-nieces. And also, when we have a WP, it’ll mean that men are freer to make fun of women and not treat them like delicate china. I spent last week in a summer house in Connecticut with four women and their fussiness –– my God, the endless deliberations about what restaurant to go to and what to wear, meanwhile America stands at the gate of authoritarianism. When Kamala takes Doug to the White House, I’ll be free to speak my mind. The glass ceiling that prevents men from ridiculing women because they’re an oppressed group will be broken. Look out, ladies.

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I turn 82 in a few weeks in the midst of a long tour doing solo shows up Northeast, which is the best way to turn very old, to ride around and entertain beautiful strangers, all of them younger. I do not want to sit at a table of cranks and geezers, each eager to relate his or her own medical history, and then someone wheels in a bonfire of a birthday cake and we sing the old song in our ruined voices and eat melted wax with angel food and someone tells me all about an article they read about carcinoma. I don’t like cake. I’d prefer a pie, rhubarb, with a little tang to it, and two scoops of vanilla. We octogenarians get compliments that sound like eulogies, so go away, stick it in your ear. I’ve had a complicated life with more than my share of wrong turns and incompletes, but I’m in reasonable health, thanks to American medicine, and I have good friends, and I’m married to a smart and funny woman who makes my heart skip when she puts a hand on my shoulder. And I have work to do. God has a purpose for me, yet to be fulfilled, and maybe talking to you, dear reader, is it, so make the best of it. Too bad it’s via internet so you can’t use it afterward for cat litter.

I talk to Him now and then, bargaining about my death. I want to reach 97 as my mother did and be as alert as she and pass from the world in a few days, dozing, listening to gospel music, and He tells me, by way of my wife, that this is my problem, not His, that I need to walk a couple miles briskly every day and eat two meals and cut back on red meat.

The show is educational. I do 90 minutes from memory and some of it is true and I let the audience decide. I also recite limericks. This is a limerick:

There is a stand-up named Keillor

Who is not a nostalgia dealer

And whose talk can

Be rather deadpan

And also surreal and surrealer.

The beauty of octogenarianism is freedom. Your career is over. You’re done. You look out at the crowd and see people googling your name to figure out who you are. It doesn’t matter. Your job is to cheer up the people who are depressed seeing that trailer trash from Queens is headed back to the White House. White Castle is more his taste. The man lies like a cheap carpet. If you saw him a few years ago attempt to comically impersonate the reporter who has cerebral palsy, that is all you need to know about the man. He is not 78, he is 13. The American people are exercising their perfect right to irony and electing a delinquent to be the leader of the Free World. My job this summer and fall is to stay on the sunny side of the street and avoid words such as grump, slump, dump, hump, rump, and sump pump.

I might recite: “All of the lovers and the love they made — nothing between them was a mistake — all that we did for love’s sake was not wasted and will never fade,” and I almost believe this, the forgiving of my own mistakes. I do my poem about sperm. Sometimes I come across an audience that wants to sing and we sing “America” or the “Battle Hymn.” And if it feels right, I hum “When peace like a river attendeth my way” and they’re right there with me and we do “It Is Well with My Soul.” Some audiences tolerate this and others are actually moved. I started performing in my thirties for the usual reason, to be the center of attention, but now I hope to be useful. The country is in peril. Most people know this and don’t need me to tell them. I want to give them ninety minutes during which they won’t think about the peril whatsoever and then, driving home, it will dawn on them all the harder. Prisoners need a vacation, just like everyone else. That’s my advice, sweetheart. Take time off. Go camping, hike up a river canyon, look at the stars at night, play games with children, practice the art of seduction on your spouse, go for days without reading the paper, and when you come back to it, you will be properly alarmed.

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