Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 16

There never was a bad nap. I pass this wisdom on to you, as an old man who has experienced more disappointment than you’ll ever know and it took me 75 years to learn how to deal with it: you lie down, close your eyes, and wake up feeling better.

I used to eat Wheaties because they sponsored “Jack Armstrong, The All-American Boy” on the radio back before the rest of you were born and a men’s quartet sang, “Have you tried Wheaties? They’re whole wheat with all of the bran. Won’t you try Wheaties? For wheat is the best food of man.” Jack traveled the world foiling the evil plans of villains, and Wheaties were made by General Mills, based in Minneapolis, and Jack was based on a student at the University of Minnesota, which I intended to attend (and did, and graduated with a B.A.), and I was loyal to it for years, but last year, the most profitable in General Mills’s history, they jacked up the price of Wheaties to $8 while reducing the food content, and I felt betrayed and I haven’t put a spoonful of the Breakfast of Champions to my lips. The cereal in the box is worth about a dime, the box itself about a quarter, and the rest goes to enable a battalion of execs to own homes in Minneapolis and Aruba and Aspen and fly to Paris for a weekend. Nothing to do with foiling evil plans.

This disappoints me and I lie down for twenty minutes and the feeling passes though the boycott continues.

I feel the same way about the University, having learned that the football coach’s salary is ten times that of the U’s president. Not another penny should they expect from me. A nap ensues, and I go on to other issues.

Sometimes I’m stricken with dread that I will trip on a molehill and fall and hit my head on some geologic formation and suddenly I’ll be unable to spell “isosceles” and “insouciant” and “Piscacadawadaquoddymoggin” or remember the name of my cousin Joyce’s husband or be able to stand on one foot for thirty seconds and I’ll be on a downhill slide toward becoming a burden to others and my beloved, a skilled musician, will feel obligated to become a caregiver. Yikes!! But I lie down and in a little while, dread evaporates.

Mostly I live in a comfortable bubble, enjoying my morning coffee, avoiding bad news that’s beyond my power to affect, bloody wars raging in Ukraine and Gaza, brutal civil wars in Myanmar and Africa, waves of migrants trying to escape violence and poverty — I am mostly oblivious. The Christian missionaries who set out to save souls in Africa and South America saw the world much more clearly than I do. The Ecuadorean moms selling candy bars in subway stations know more about real life than I do. A person could walk along the little shops in low-rent neighborhoods and talk to immigrant entrepreneurs and learn more about the world than if you went to grad school for a Ph.D., but nobody I know does.

I ignore my relatives who are loyal to Mr. Presidefendant who is as removed from reality as I am. I went to high school with a Jim Jordan, a Matt Gaetz, a Mike Johnson, but my classmates don’t hold public office, they just hold a mug of beer in the corner saloon while they grouse about the unfairness of life. A nap would do them good.

Last week New York City felt an earthquake centered in New Jersey that measured 4.8 on the Richter scale, a slight tremor compared to the 7.4 quake on Taiwan. Some news reports used the verb “hit” but what I felt was only a vibration similar to what you feel standing on the corner as a bus goes by. A few days later the city went all out for the semi-total eclipse of the sun. Crowds gathered in Central Park, the manufacturers of eclipse glasses got rich, and my beloved was tremendously thrilled by the whole astronomical experience. It was a joyful communal experience for millions. For me, looking up at the darkened sky to see a tiny pinpoint of corona was a huge disappointment. I was expecting to be transformed in some way, and if not Raptured, at least enlightened, but the thrill was a good deal less than what I get from the average candle in the dark.

The eclipse occurred around 3:20 p.m. and I lay down around 4 and felt much better by 4:30.

If this column has disappointed you, go back and read the first paragraph.

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I did my solo stand-up act in Ohio last week and in the midst of a story, the auditorium shook with a blast of thunder. I paused. The audience laughed. Another roll of thunder. And I started singing, “How Great Thou Art,” with the line, “I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,” and the audience joined in en masse, they knew the words, they sang it so beautifully, the chorus drowned out the thunder. I was telling a story about me as a teenager necking with a girl in a car and when thunder struck again, I looked up at the ceiling, addressing the Lord, and said, “It was her idea, it wasn’t mine. She unbuttoned my shirt.”

I loved that audience dearly and gave them a good ninety minutes and afterward a distinguished man stopped by to shake hands. Back when, he’d heard me on the radio. I said, “I detect an air of authority about you. You’re the president of something.” He said he was a retired Army major; he’d commanded a tank battalion. “Where?” I said. “Vietnam,” he said. I said I’d never heard of tanks used in Vietnam. He said, “That’s because they would’ve sunk four feet down in the Delta and so they were useless. When we got there, we became infantry.”

I said, “You’re looking at a draft dodger.” I felt I owed it to him. I said that I was ordered to report for induction and I wrote to the draft board and told them why I wouldn’t go and I didn’t. I waited for the knock on the door and it never came. So I did a radio show for fifty years without using my name. He looked me in the eye and said, “You did the right thing.” It was a profound moment. I felt that an accommodation had been made. I was forgiven by a man who had earned that right. There was no need to say more.

The next morning at the hotel I ran into a couple who’d been to the show and said they liked it. Back when I was more hip, I took the audience for granted and now I don’t. The woman worked for Campbell’s Soup and the man was a painting contractor, they’d been married 43 years, had driven three hours to see the show, and we stood around and talked for a while, and I was not a celebrity to them, I was sort of a relative. They each came from a large family, as do I; their mothers had been canners, so was mine; they had lost a young son to epilepsy, I lost a brother and a grandson. I have no idea if they are Republicans or Democrats; I didn’t think to ask.

I went into radio for which I had no aptitude but I was old enough to remember radio in its prime, the amiable hosts, the comedians, the adventure stories, and I became briefly a big deal back in the Eighties and invented Lake

Wobegon and Guy Noir and the cowboys Dusty and Lefty and the American Duct Tape Council and the Federated Organization of Associations and now that I’m off the air, my audience is a fraction of what it once was but it’s so much more fun now. A keen sense of mortality makes each day sort of splendid and I loved meeting the major and the painter and the soup lady. I loved meeting the enema lady.

Years ago, I went to a clinic to have my prostate seen to and I lay on my side in a small dark room where the woman apologized to me and then began the procedure, and when the tube was in and the water was flowing, she said, “I have to tell you that I’m a big fan of your show.” She said, “I think your singing has improved a lot over the years.” “Thank you,” I said. She said, “Lie here until you feel a compelling urge to vacate and then get up and go to the toilet.” And then she said, “Who wrote that song about ‘these are the days’? Did you?”

“No, Van Morrison did,” and I quoted the lines, These are the days now that we must savor; we must enjoy while we can. These are the days that will last forever; you’ve got to hold them in your hand. And I do. Cherish the day, my friend. Each one is illuminated by small miracles.

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It was plain and simple joy to sit in a packed church on Easter Sunday and sing the Alleluias and listen to the story of the women finding the tomb empty and wait in a long line for Communion. We Episcopalians have been known to marry existentialists, hedonists, individualists, pantheists, Baptists, and disAnglified sophisticates, and it’s lovely to have them all under the tent to celebrate Christ’s Resurrection regardless of what doubts may flutter in their heads. I grew up among separatist fundamentalists, a joyless and judgmental lot, and this was entirely different, public happiness openly shared. The women at the tomb where his body had been laid were afraid but there was no fear among us on Sunday morning, and in Manhattan, where one’s mind easily turns to dark scenarios, this joy is palpable.

And after Communion, we stood and sang a beloved Catholic hymn whose chorus, “And I will raise them up, and I will raise them up on the last day,” brings many of us to tears, and though Episcopalian, members of the church of the wingtips and tweed vests, in our wave of feeling we raise one arm like storefront Pentecostals, and I think of my dead brother, my grandson Freddy, my parents and my wife’s parents, and feel the glow of faith that we will be reunited. This faith is not an intellectual feat; it feels miraculous and I carry it around all day.

Life is miraculous. The Lord is good and his mercy endureth forever. I walked away from the separatists when I was 20. My father was faithful to them all his life and was disappointed by my erratic ways but never said a word about it to me. He was a carpenter and I might’ve become one too but I was kicked out of shop class in 8th grade because I was joking around while running a power saw; Mr. Orville Buehler said, “All you do is talk so I’m sending you up to Speech,” and so, instead of a life on the assembly line, I wound up in broadcasting. I am a stranger to the toolbox; my wife does the home repairs. My father was terrified any time he had to speak in public; I stood on a stage in Newberry, S.C., on Good Friday and told stories for two hours without notes and loved every minute of it and especially when I had them sing, “It Is Well With My Soul” united in a cappella harmony. They knew the words by heart, and also “America” and “Going to the Chapel” and “How Great Thou Art,” and I didn’t see anybody googling with their cellphones.

Life is good. Surgeons can run a tube up a vein in your groin and repair your innards easily where years ago they had to open up your chest and create Frankenstein scars that brought your career as a swimsuit model to a crashing halt. GPS is being developed for home use so that as a man stands at the toilet, a voice says, “Aim slightly to the right.” Beautiful names are being given to infants that didn’t used to be available, like Seraphina, Arabella, Camila, Penelope, Autumn, Aurora, Prairie. In my lifetime, longevity has lengthened –– look at the obits –– if you live to be 96 or 97, it means you can do dumb things well into your seventies and still have time to recover. Me, for example. Eighty-one and I’m writing a novel although the Age of White Male Authorship is long past. I’m still out on the road doing shows, talking, singing, hoping to get a spot on the Ed Sullivan show. That was on Sunday nights and all of America sat down and watched Ed, he replaced Sunday night Bible study, it was the beginning of the decline of Protestantism, but thank God we still observe Easter and are capable of joy at finding the tomb empty.

And then on the long walk home afterward, it struck me that I hadn’t thought for a single moment about the Mafia Don running for the White House, the incredible con man selling his souvenir Bibles for $59.99, the most despised politician in our history, after Jefferson Davis, hoping to sneak into power via the Electoral College. There is nothing about the Resurrection that calls this man to mind. He isn’t part of that story. He is making America pray again but not in the way he might like to imagine.

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I spent last week gadding about the Carolinas doing shows and enjoying the South, eating eggs and grits and hearing the waitress say, “Can I get you more coffee, darling?” and encountering Republicans, a tribe rarer than Mohicans on the West Side of Manhattan where I live. I miss them. My uncles tended Republican, believing in personal responsibility and fiscal reality, and at church on Palm Sunday, at coffee hour, I heard the word “taxes” uttered contemptuously and a gentleman in his sixties was saying, “Everything government touches, it messes up,” a genuine living Republican. Twenty minutes before, at Mass, he had been forgiven his iniquity, and I wanted to put my arms around him.

I am comfortable in the South. I’m okay with not talking politics with crazy people. Yes, in the rural areas, they display the Confederate flag, but I’ve got junk in my closet too. I see no need to remove statues of Civil War heroes: just paint their uniforms olive drab and enlist them in the U.S. Army. A good summer job for teenagers.

I love the warmth of the people. At my shows, I like to have the audience sing, just for the sensuous warmth of it. We sing “My country, ’tis of thee” and in the South we can sing a hymn or two a cappella and it’s amazing to observe this from the stage, people who are surprised and delighted and moved by the beauty of their voices mingled with the others. They learned this as Baptist kids and then (I imagine) lapsed into secular humanism and went through doctrine therapy and devoted themselves to vintage wines and dark coffees and French baking, and now, as I sing “When peace like a river attendeth my way and sorrows like sea billows roll,” the words come back to them and they sing like risen saints at the Sunday camp meeting and they dab at their eyes with a hanky. After that and “Amazing Grace,” I can get them to sing the Battle Hymn of the Republic and lay down their arms.

For the stand-up part of my act, I grieved over the mild winter in Minnesota, the lack of ice fishing, snowmobiling, the loss of the Fellowship of the Jumper Cables, the lack of adversity that gives us northerners our sense of identity, and I brought Carolinians (many of them exiled northerners) to genuinely feel the loss. And having accomplished that, I set out to convince them that aging is the best thing that can happen to them and why they should embrace it. It’s an impressive feat when you get millennials to buy into this.

And then my singing partners Heather Masse and Christine DiGiallonardo joined me in singing songs by my fellow octogenarians Jerry Garcia, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, McCartney & Lennon, and when we sing in three-part harmony, “These are the days of the endless summer, there is no past, there’s only now,” I believe in it though I’m twice my singing partners’ age and have so much past from back before they were born.

And in the course of doing these shows I feel a profound mystery: it’s much more fun being an old has-been than it was to be a big success. When I was briefly a big success forty years ago, people stood in line to interview me and ask how it felt to be so admired. It felt fearful, like looking over the edge of a cliff and a thousand feet down to rocky beach and surf.

Four decades later, I’m wading in gentle surf, singing “Under African Skies” and “In My Life” and “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” with Heather and Christine and Richard Dworsky at the piano. He is Jewish but plays gospel very very well. We do “Nearer My God to Thee” and people in the front rows are ready to come forward.

A showman gets old, the audience goes into assisted living, the crowd shrinks, and I can see I’m coming closer and closer to what my mother prayed I would be, a preacher. When I’m 90, I’ll be standing on a street corner in Greenville, South Carolina, Bible in hand, preaching, “Give thanks to the Lord for He is good, His mercy endureth forever,” and if you hear me singing, come stand close by and join in. There’ll be no collection, just sing with me, darling.

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Some friends of mine put me up for membership in a very exclusive New York club, one where you go and meet all the right sort of people who know things that a nice Midwestern guy doesn’t, such as where can I find a really vicious lawyer when I need one and how can I improve my chances of getting a rave review in the Times, so the friends wrote recommendations and the admissions committee interviewed me, and a week later I was rejected for the best of reasons, because I was dumb.

It was a Monday, 2 p.m. I flew into LaGuardia that morning with a suitcase so I took a cab home to the West Side and decided to take a shower and freshen up. Dumb. I should’ve gone straight to the club but instead I made myself fresh and winsome and dashed to the subway and took the B train to near the club and then came out of the subway and in confusion walked the wrong way and arrived at the club half an hour late.

I left my cellphone in my coat at the door, forgetting that I need an app on the phone to control volume on my hearing aids, so when I sat down with the committee a half hour late, I could only hear fragments of what they said and rather than excuse myself and go solve the problem, I tried to imagine what they said and I improvised, I told stories, I tried to be amusing, and for all I know, they were asking about my career and I was talking about cashmere. It was a chilly goodbye.

And a few days later I was rejected. Justly. Why would you admit a demented man to your club — there are care centers for those people.

It’s too late for me to be exclusive, when I think of the dumb things I’ve done, blunders with money, mistaken love, screwing up a simple interview. I’ve done things so stupid, I am earnestly hoping for memory loss. Plagiarism is one of the few sins I haven’t committed, otherwise in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state. I was rather distinguished back in 1986 when the editors of the Los Angeles Times hosted a luncheon in my honor and my old friend Irv Letofsky, who was reporting for the paper, sidled up to me and said, “I knew you when you were just white trash.” I loved that man. He was from North Dakota where they don’t put on airs.

I have a number of clubs already, the Episcopal church a half mile away, which lifts the spirits of its people, and another is the reading room in the public library where I sit among silent studious men and women one-fourth my age, and another is the subway, which rolls into the station and I enter the nearest door and find myself in a new assortment of people, always surprising, some of whom could use a vicious lawyer or a rave review, others are doing okay as is.

The train heads downtown and a lady walks through the car, hand outstretched, saying, “Can anybody help me?” over and over, and most people look away, some shake their heads, some study her, and it’s a moment of simple human truth. The conscience is touched, you hear people thinking, “She’s only using it for drugs,” and someone else, “Hungry children may wait in a tenement basement in the Bronx,” and the hungry children win out, I reach in my pocket, meaning to get a one but I find a roll of bills, I’ve been to an ATM, and her eye is on me and I pull out a fifty and give it to her. I like fifties, they make me feel rich.

This is a tender human moment between strangers. She whispers, “Thank you very much,” and I’ll take that whisper home with me. I am not better than she. Jesus doesn’t think so, neither do I. I worked very hard but I enjoyed it all and I was wildly lucky. Giving her the fifty reminds me of just how lucky I’ve been and then it’s worth a couple hundred, a decent profit for a short ride. We should start a Good Luck Club, wear a clover badge, you recognize another member, you are obliged to tell them a joke. “Why are you scratching yourself?” “Because I’m the only one who knows where it itches.” You’re welcome.

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Easter is almost upon us when we Christians take a deep breath after Lent and relax and whoop it up a little. I mean, rising from the dead is no ordinary thing — if you were heading to the airport and passed a cemetery and saw people coming up out of the ground, wouldn’t you pull over and take a video with your iPhone even if your flight is boarding in an hour? Of course you would.

And what if it were a Unitarian cemetery, a mausoleum with a large silver question mark on the roof instead of a cross, and you saw clouds of ashes forming into friendly people nicely dressed and a couple of them are standing by the highway, hitchhiking, and you stop and they get in and the guy says, “Wow, you won’t believe what we’ve just seen.”?

I’m much older than you and I know more deceased people than you do, aunts and uncles plus all my teachers and a great many classmates, so the Resurrection Day would be more dramatic for me, more names to remember, more people wanting to tell me their afterlife experiences and there’d be name-dropping, of course, saints and apostles, authors, sports heroes. I’d listen politely.

Some Christians feel that the dead are looking down on us from above and that we’ll have explaining to do, but I don’t believe that. I don’t have any idea what death is like and I don’t sit and ponder that. I only hope that someone will hold my hand and if she is playing “Peace in the Valley” or “I’ll Fly Away,” I can speak and tell her to please stop.

I know that life is a one-way trip but if I went to my doctor and he shook his head and explained disseminated angiofibrosis of the fantods for which there is no cure, I imagine getting in the car, not fastening the seat belt, driving to the liquor store to buy a quart of gin and a carton of Luckies, and heading home to celebrate the end of sobriety and my career as a liberal Democrat worried about climate change; I’d cash in the bonds and get the penthouse suite on the Queen Mary 2 for a round-the-world cruise and plan to spend evenings in the casino.

Meanwhile, I’m feeling rather cheerful. The paper is full of suffering but I’m still thinking about the 93-year-old widow of a Wall Street financier who has donated $1 billion to a medical school in the Bronx to pay tuition for all the students. Dr. Ruth Gottesman.

There was a doctor named Ruth

Devoted to goodness and truth

Who donated a pile

To install a free stile

In place of the college tollbooth.

I read about a public opinion poll in Ukraine that showed 77% are optimistic about the country’s future. This, while rocket and drone attacks are an ordinary occurrence, six million have fled the country, half the people have trouble feeding and housing their families. This is optimism of a heroic order. Here in America, where the Canadian army is not launching missiles at Manhattan, 42% are optimistic. What’s wrong?

And the presidential candidate of a major party is out on the campaign trail telling Americans that we have become a third-world country. Where did he get this? Has he been to Mozambique or Myanmar lately?

There’s no end of bad news, of course. Cosmetic companies are targeting young children in advertising skin care products. The East Coast is sinking due to over-pumping of ground water by municipalities, meanwhile the sea is rising, so although our New York apartment is on the 12th floor, someday we’ll be on the 11th, the 10th, 9th, and eventually in a sub-basement flat along with snakes and turtles. And I grieve for the Florida billionaire unable to find a surety company to guarantee his bond. What is wrong with people?

It’s enough to keep a person awake at night, but then I found a method that works for me. I lie in the dark and imagine I’m in Stockholm, at the royal palace. I’ve won the Nobel Prize in Physics with a formula I discovered in a dream that unlocked several secrets of the Creation and there I am, ignorant of physics but surrounded by Swedish royalty, an honor guard, ranks of scholars in caps and gowns, cheering crowds, and there, risen from the dead, is Mr. Swenson who gave me a C-minus in 10th grade Physics and even that was charitable. He is beaming, arrayed in shining white raiment, as we all shall be someday, or so I have heard.

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It’s so good being an old man that if I’d only known, I’d have arrived at 81 sooner, and I don’t just mean senior discounts. I mean the liberation from hipness, being out of the loop, going to bed early, not reading book reviews or pundits. William Butler Yeats said it all in 1919: “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” My wife just walked over in her pajamas as I was googling the Yeats and she leaned down and I was filled with passionate intensity, so I’m no better than you, I’m just older.

I don’t go to movies anymore — don’t know the actors and the butter on the popcorn is worse than ever — don’t watch TV because the remote is way beyond my pay grade. That’s why I’m not a Republican: I never watched “The Apprentice” — and there was a deadness in the man’s eyes that told the truth. I read a transcript of his speech in Rome, Georgia, a week ago: “We have the stupidest people in the history of our country running things. These are stupid, these are stupid people. And we should be saying, ‘Crooked Joe, you are fired. Get out of here. You are fired. You’re incompetent. You’re incompetent. Get out of here. You’re destroying our nation. Get the hell out of here. You’re destroying our country, Joe.’ He doesn’t have a clue. He doesn’t even know. He doesn’t know he is destroying it. He has no clue. He has no clue.”

No other president could have talked like that except maybe in his sleep, stood up in public at a microphone and said, “You’re stupid. You’re a stupid dummy. Dummy, dummy, dummy, dummy, dummy. Get me? You’re stupid.” This man makes George W. Bush seem like Winston Churchill. The party of Lincoln is falling in line but we’re Americans, we don’t pay money for a bowl of cat turd soup that’s labeled Cream of Mushroom, so don’t lose hope. If the voters listen to the man and look into his eyes, he’ll win Alabama and Mississippi, claim fraud, and go live in Riyadh. Praise the Lord.

Old age is all about gratitude. I’m a lucky man. I chose the right parents, two fundamentalists so I’m guilt-ridden, yes, but there was no fetal alcohol syndrome. Guilt made me a better husband. In the 8th grade, Mr. Orville Buehler saw me joking around in shop class while my rotary power saw was screaming through a 2×6, and he kicked me out and sent me up to LaVona Person’s speech class, a turning point in my life. I made my living by talking and avoided hard work, avoided drowning and highway fatality and drug addiction, avoided therapy so I never found out how troubled I was, which would’ve depressed me.

I am funnier now than I used to be, thanks to flatulence. Women don’t experience this because they talk a lot and so the pressure never builds up, but every man over 70 has four or five eruptions a day and so laughter follows us wherever we go. That’s why Speaker Johnson had that look on his face sitting behind Joe during the State of the Onion. I am still doing shows and my band sits behind me and has a whee of a time. And now Palm Sunday is coming when we Piskies clap our hands and dance and then Easter when one candidate will be in church hearing about the Resurrection and the other will be playing golf and not counting the shots he doesn’t like. And then Opening Day on March 28 and the nation returns to rational thinking. If a pitcher stands on the mound and yells, “You’re a dummy, you got no clue, you stupid dummy,” he still has to throw the ball and the batter can take a swing. It’s a beautiful game. No longer the national pastime, but we old liberals like it.

Things are looking up. It was a miserable winter, dreary rainy days instead of snow, but now the daffodils and tulips are blooming, and this spring I am really truly going to sit down and read Moby-Dick. I was an English major, I took a course in Melville in 1963, wrote a paper about the symbolism of Moby-Dickand got a B on it but never read the dang book. I’m told it’s good. Ahab goes down with the whale, Ishmael survives, using Queequeg’s coffin for a buoy. Melville’s buried in the Bronx, at the end of the No. 4 subway. When I’m done with the book, I’ll go out and put daffodils on his grave.

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Today I am going to get organized and the first item of business is to establish a Home Plate in which I will put things such as billfold, keys, glasses, phone, pens, meds, nail clipper, checkbook, postage stamps, cufflinks, shoelaces, eyedrops, matches, grip tape, flashlight, magnifying glass, things that in the time I’ve spent looking for them in the past few years I could’ve translated The Iliad and made peace with China and unionized college athletes, both men and women.

On the other hand, do we really need a new Iliad? The poet hit a homer and the Odyssey is even better. Ulysses is tempted by the babes along the way but he makes it back to Penelope and is a happy man.

When I’ve organized my stuff, I plan to write one more novel and that’s absolutely the last, no matter how many six-figure advances publishers thrust at me over lunch at La Côte Basque, and then I’ll start writing Screwing Up Is a Good Start, which puts forward my philosophy that disaster draws us together and success isolates us. Look at me, I was a very good boy who gave my parents no worries, and as a result we were strangers to each other. Now I wish I’d gotten a girl pregnant in 12th grade, lived with her in their basement, got into the Scotch, sniffed the white powder, spent some time in the lockup, and my folks would’ve adored the child, coaxed me back to responsible adulthood, my wife would’ve written a brilliant first novel based on the crap I put her through and we’d be sitting pretty today. Instead, I walked a straight line, followed the rules, ascended the slippery slope, and now I sit here alone, nobody calls, nobody texts.

No, sometimes doing wrong is exactly the right move. In all my adult years, I’ve avoided being a houseguest so as to be No Trouble To Anyone and now I’m an old man and I have no close friendships because people think I’m a misanthrope. Me, the amiable host of a prize-nominated radio show. I’m doing my show in Greenville, South Carolina, in a few days and my relatives in the area all know about it but has one of them said, “Come and stay with us, we have a guest room in the basement. You’d have to share it with a dog and a macaw, and the toilet is upstairs but we’ll give you a lantern.”? No, I haven’t heard a word. Story of my life: my independence alienates me; I should’ve joined a support group for the self-righteous and broken down and sobbed and repented of my hypocrisy and gone out for drinks afterward and formed fast friendships. I never did that.

I have a houseguest in New York as I write this, a realist photographer friend from way back who’s had many gallery shows, portraits of weary hoboes and drifters and winos, and he’s taken several pictures of me and they show an aging performer left friendless by the cruel passage of time.

I speak from experience. People love people who have good stories and there is no good story without trouble so get into trouble while you’re still young and have time to climb out of the ditch. Don’t do things that can really hurt you like drugs you buy from strangers on the street, just fall in with lowlifes, fall for an obvious scam, say crazy things you know aren’t true, and the simplest way to accomplish that is to endorse the Florida Orange. Now.

Starting in January 2025, there’s going to be a market for Republican confessionals — a yuge market — the lecture circuit will have room for upright people admitting that they were hornswoggled by the most obvious conman to come down the pike since the guy who sold the mimeograph that prints fifties. Even Scientologists can see through him. It’s too late for me to get on that gravy train, but you millennials and Gen Xers, don’t let Mitch McConnell and Mark Meadows grab it all. But you’ve got to act now when his hairdo still looks legit and the poll numbers lend a sense of drama. In June, the air goes out of the balloon, the rats take to the lifeboats.

If I could find my phone, you could call me and I’d say more, but I’ve torn the apartment apart, no luck. We could go for coffee but I don’t have my glasses and can’t find my keys so I’m stuck at home.

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I come from pot roast people and the past two months have been rough on me, when, doing penance for the holidays, we’ve been on a bunny rabbit diet, grazing on bowls of greenery. My mother made pot roast for Sunday dinner, which made me think of it as sacred food. She put chuck roast in a covered pan in the oven at low heat when we left for church and when we returned four hours later, the kitchen was redolent with goodness. I don’t recall that she ever tossed a salad. Cows ate salads so whatever good was in them came to us by way of beef.

Urbanites are in flight from their pot roast heritage unless it’s called “pot-au-feu,” which is the same thing — cheap beef cooked slowly — but served by someone with an accent.

It’s winter food, and this has been the weirdest winter in memory, January one day, April the next, snow falling and soon melting, and lakes in Minnesota have not frozen so and ice-fishing shacks have remained on shore.

It’s depressing. We northern people are stoics, and our stoicism is severely challenged by this crazy winter.

(When I was a boy we had real winter and we walked to school, which was never canceled even if the building was not visible in the blizzard. We entered the school building under six-foot icicles weighing upward of a hundred pounds, the result of poor insulation, icicles that, had the child ahead of me slammed the door, could’ve split my skull in two and disfigured the rest of me, making it necessary to bury me in a closed coffin — my cold lifeless hands holding a tribute from my classmates, “He was a good boy who always took turns and never pushed. He was one of the best at coloring maps. He was the best speller in the class. And in Scouts, he tied the best bowline hitch of anybody in Troop 209.” But that was then and this is now.)

Winter gives us an identity. In June, July, and August, you can be sensitive about being unappreciated by others, misunderstood, marginalized, objectified, but winter tells you who you are: you are a mammal and nature is making a serious attempt to kill you and you must stay warm, not slip on ice and fall and hurt yourself, and not be impaled on enormous icicles. This is why my people frown on the idea of fleeing to Florida where you sit in the sun and sip fruit drinks with rum in them but they don’t taste alcoholic, they taste fruity, so you drink them all afternoon and by suppertime you are telling the most intimate details of your life to strangers from Cleveland.

No ice fishing means that old men lose the comfort of refuge in a shack on a frozen lake, enjoying dirty jokes and Brotherhood and freedom of speech, escaping that nagging voice that says, “You need a haircut,” “You spilled beer on the rug,” “You said you were going to fix the faucet,” “Look at you, you need to lose some weight,” “You promised the kids you’d go to their concert,” “You need to call Social Security and get a new Medicare card,” “I don’t know why in God’s name you spend hours sitting out on the lake fishing when you could be getting rid of your junk in the basement.”

In this warm winter, nobody’s car refused to start. This is part of Minnesota culture. People carry jumper cables in their trunk. If you see someone in a car with a dead battery, you’re obliged to stop and offer to jump-start their car and they are obligated to accept the offer. In this way, many people who, under normal circumstances, would never have become friends, became friends. I know a man who became reconciled with his ex-wife when she stopped and jump-started his car. Same with brothers estranged by political differences.

Pot roast, the recognition of our identity as mammals, the luxury of ice fishing, and rampant Good Samaritanism: you turn the key and hear the click of the dead engine, someone you never cared for knocks on your window, the hood is opened, there is electrical communion, the engine roars, it’s the Fellowship of the Jumper Cables.

What is the answer? Canada. Come November there may be additional reasons for heading north but the ones I’ve cited may be reason enough. I’m thinking of Iqaluit or Kugluktuk in Nunavut Territory among the Inuit people where polar bears and wolves thrive and where the housing resembles sheds and much of it is on pilings. I am waiting for just the right time to bring up the subject, perhaps after a round of rum cocktails.

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I haven’t yet been invited to give a commencement address this spring and I’m okay with that. I am 81, an age that’s gotten a bad rap recently, and I’m not famous anymore, but nonetheless I do have things to say to the Class of ’24 and I come cheap and have my own gown if you’re unable to provide one.

I did a radio show for years whose name, if you rearrange the letters, spells “Pie Aroma in Microphone,” a show of wholesome humor and uplifting music, nothing satanic or hallucinatory and only gently satiric, and yet it did well in New York City, and New Yorkers curbed their irony when they came in the door and listened politely.

The show was inspired by an article I wrote for The New Yorker about the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, and being published there rather than in Popular Mechanics or Good Housekeeping gave me a patina of sophistication that appealed to the elitists of public radio and they opened the temple doors to me and on many stations, “Pie Aroma in Microphone” followed the Metropolitan Opera broadcast, sort of like the tail wagging the Wagner. And my hero John Updike, back in the days of White Male Authorship, got me into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, one of only three humorists in the club, which looks darned good on my résumé. People from my hometown of Anoka, Minnesota, look at that and think, “Him? He didn’t even make National Honor Society in high school. He got a B minus in English and even that was generous.”

Had the article been about the Grand Canal in Venice, the Grand Canyon, Grandma Moses, Ole Bull, or optometry, or had I landed in the American Academy of Incarcerated Debtors, it would be a very different matter.

I am one of America’s few remaining octogenarian stand-up comics, still able to stand for up to two hours, even three, and in the current comedy crop, I am a classicist. I know about the engineer who’s sentenced to death and is laid, blindfolded, in the guillotine but they pull the lanyard and nothing happens, and try again, and again, and decide to commute his sentence to life in prison and they remove the blindfold, and he looks up and says, “Give me a pair of pliers, I see the problem.”

I also know about the man named Scraggs who fed his poodle condoms so she’d poop in plastic bags.

I work clean. I can do sex jokes at an AARP convention but not for the 18–22 age group, they would be horrified by the thought of grandpa sex, more than horrified, sickened, indignant, militantly opposed.

I am quite comfortable speaking at a church school. I am a Christian myself, I do believe that the Son of God came to this planet, the co-Creator of our solar system and infinite more solar systems and constellations billions of light years away, and when you can get your arms around the idea that God Almighty loves you personally, not just in theory, then you’ve achieved something remarkable, like juggling eight balls in the air while gargling “O sole mio.” But I’m not preachy about this. I’ve spoken to Jewish groups, and some of my best friends are Unitarians. I tell them, “If I’m wrong about the afterlife, no problem, I’ll just cease to be, but if you’re wrong and you face God, I’d like to see you talk your way out of that.”

I don’t require luxury accommodations. I’m fine with economy hotels. I prefer not to be put up in the home of a family with small children. A Holiday Inn Express is fine; they serve a nice scrambled-egg breakfast buffet. A coffeemaker in the room would be nice and I’d prefer a shower whose Hot and Cold knobs are not directly under the showerhead so that one must stand naked while figuring out which knob is which, dreading the possibility of being scalded and having to call 911 and moaning in pain as EMTs haul me to their van, and I know that I will now become their anecdote (“You won’t believe the call we got this morning …”) and they will google me and find out that I hosted “Pie Aroma in Microphone” and am in the Academy of Arts and Letters and yet I didn’t know to Stand Outside The Shower While Turning On Water. I don’t want to become a joke, okay?

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