Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 17

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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I spent a couple hours on the phone the other night with a man I haven’t seen since high school, he in Northern California, I in New York City, two old men recalling our youth in Minnesota. I love the telephone; it can be so intimate — like radio, which is the business I was in for years — the voice carries so much humanity, even the silences speak.

He was the older brother of my high school friend Pete who had died a week before of stage 4 squamous carcinoma that had spread through his body, making chemo and radiation pointless, but his brother and I didn’t talk much about death, we let our memories drift back to high school. His family was Catholic, mine was evangelical, he was the handsomest boy in school and dated my cousin Delores briefly, remembered her beauty; his mother was a friend of my mother-in-law, two smart women devoted to the arts and other good causes; he delivered the evening paper and remembered his customers; he was a third-string football player who didn’t mind sitting on the bench. His brother was a star halfback. Both of them, to me then and still, epitomized smarts and the essence of cool. In a little farm town, they stood out.

As I say, it was a mysterious conversation, it went on and on, threads of memory winding in and out, and if we’d been sitting across the table from each other, we’d have been keenly aware of our age, his 83, mine almost 82, but our voices were ageless, and the longer we talked, the more we remembered, life on the Mississippi, our sainted mothers and taciturn fathers, the brilliant classmate Leeds, killed by a drunk driver at the age of 20, the grief of his girlfriend Corinne, and the past became almost tangible, we were passing each other in the halls of adolescence, I bound for radio, he for diagnostic radiology. It started out as a wake for Pete but it became a séance and after the call ended, I realized what it was all about: friendship, family, kindness, brotherhood. Against the inexorable march of time, weighing our losses, we relived our common past and found it benevolent.

We didn’t talk about our children, or our careers, or old age: for two hours, we were 18 and 17, in a small town in Minnesota, seeing it with the clarity of age and finding ourselves very fortunate.

The telephone, as I say, has become my main medium. I haven’t listened to the radio for years: the voices strike me as either robotic or berserk. I have a TV but I can’t figure out how to operate the controls. I write postcards, often with limericks:

Reverend Kate, I truly respect her,

And I am no moral objector,

But I heard that she went

To a dance during Lent

And was caught by a rector detector.

But the phone is the best tool of friendship. Friends recovering from getting whacked by one malady or another, the friend raising his step-granddaughter, the friend about to embark for India, the two cousins who are serious students of family history and Holy Scripture but keep the two separate.

I hit 80 and suddenly the fact of mortality made each day meaningful, a cause for gratitude. I did a show in Austin, Texas, recently, 1,500 Texans singing “My country, ’tis of thee” and “Home on the Range,” and “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” a cappella in harmony — the old man on stage singing bass and thinking, “When will this happen again? Maybe never. So enjoy the moment for all it’s worth.”

This is why I stopped smoking 42 years ago, why I gave up driving when I saw double white lines on the highway instead of a single one. It’s why I got a new mitral valve. My goal is to hit 97, same as my mother.

And then, on the phone the other night, it was 1959, I was 17, a sportswriter for the local paper, standing at the 20-yard line as Pete took a handoff from Gary the quarterback and came leaping over his left tackle, grinning as he hip-faked the deep secondary and galloped along the sideline and into the end zone as the crowd cheered and we spelled out A-N-O-K-A and sang the fight song as his teammates carried him around on their shoulders and that’s where he is right now, in glory.

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If a person lives in a democracy, which thus far we do, you soon learn that politics is not an orderly business like cosmetic dentistry or carpentry, it is more like pond hockey or maybe a conclave of sociopaths or an ostrich jubilee, and the messiness can drive you crazy, like finding potatoes in your sock drawer and rutabagas in the medicine cabinet, and the alternative to despair is amusement.

So when the Alabama Supreme Court decides that an embryo is a human being and you see Republicans scrambling to distance themselves from this lest they alienate young people of voting age who were conceived in vitro, you wonder if someday sperm will be given the same protection and male masturbation will be considered child abuse.

There is no normal anymore. The Orange One is in hock for a half-billion on two court decisions and the court requires him to put the money on the table pronto but he may not have ready cash. Banks and bond companies might well blanch at giving a hand to a guy with so many bankruptcies but maybe Xi Jinping would cut him a check and save his butt. Would the Republican Party be okay with that? It’d be something new in the history of the republic, but hey, change is inevitable, no?

I’m only thinking ahead here, trying to see where we’re going. Maybe a monarchy. We already have Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Let them have the White House and Speaker Mike Johnson can be prime minister and live in a little townhouse at No. 10 K Street and when he has something to say, he can step out the front door and stand on the sidewalk and speak his piece. Decapitate the presidency by putting a crown on it. The Senate becomes the House of Bores where you plant elderly people and let them natter and harrumph all they like while the P.M. goes about the business of governing.

Number 45, Mr. Sunkist, proved one thing about the presidency: you can have a raving maniac narcissist whose knowledge of policy foreign or domestic is less than that of a bright tenth-grader, and he can bluster and wave his arms — and it’s embarrassing and it makes our allies nervous but it doesn’t really do much damage other than weaponize the Supreme Court.

Teach Harry about baseball, tell him and Meghan to button their lips, tell the press to leave them alone, and we’re all set.

Then we can deal with real problems honestly. Republicans make an issue of the southern border: okay, fine. Deal with it. Those migrants don’t head for the Rio Grande so they can enjoy Netflix. They are motivated by sheer despair. The Rio Grande is a shallow river you can wade across. If my parents had faced brutality and starvation in Minnesota in 1955, we would’ve headed straightaway for the Canadian border and learned to talk Canadian.

The truth is that there’s plenty of work for undocumented persons, the dirty work that our young people avoid so they can be singer-songwriters. The country is inundated by miserable music streaming on a thousand platforms, earning pocket change for the songwriters and gradually depressing the mean IQ of Generations X and Z, meanwhile someone needs to slaughter and butcher the turkeys, which involves repetitive work with sharp objects and actual skill. Immigrant work.

If Sunkist is convicted of insurrection, I suggest we deport him to Slovenia and see how he likes it. They must have a used castle he can buy. He can call it Trump Tower (Trump Stolp). His great line, “There has never been anything like this great movement of ours, nothing in the history of the world” translates as “Česa podobnega temu našemu velikemu gibanju še ni bilo, nikoli v zgodovini sveta.” He can tell it to his Slovenian gastroenterologist when he goes in to be treated for diarrhea.

Every morning 17 newspaper columnists tell you to dread the future — authoritarianism, an economic disaster, the collapse of Social Security and Medicare, climate change — and I don’t disagree that there’s work to be done, so go do your part, but you need to enjoy the ridiculousness too. Mr. Johnson, a Republican nerd from Shreveport whom nobody knew months ago is now walking a tightrope knowing that three Republican idiots can dump him in the drink. Our country looks to a deer in the headlights for leadership. Cut yourself a slice of chocolate cake, put three scoops of vanilla on it, tune in tomorrow.

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I was in Texas last week doing shows, which is my line of work, and was sorry to leave because, frankly, it was the most fun I can remember having while wearing a suit and tie and now I look at this sentence and am surprised to be writing it. We Minnesotans aren’t known for euphoria, we experience sexual ecstasy and we think, “Well, that wasn’t bad, a person could do worse, that’s for sure,” and on top of my northern self-restraint, I grew up fundamentalist which, even after you depart from the fold, leaves you with a lifelong allergy to pleasures of all kinds.

Fun is not our thing. We leave the party before the dancing starts. I do a show and remember what went wrong. In photographs I look like a defendant the jury has just voted unanimously to convict after ten minutes of deliberation. We are susceptible to alcoholism because we keep drinking, waiting for it to make us happy, until we lose consciousness.

And now as a self-righteous 81-year-old liberal, I tend to look down on Texas because it gave us the Bush who gave us the war in Iraq, and Ted Cruz, the man who grew a beard to try to hide his smirk. It gave us a whole slew of people whose idea of gun control is to hold the pistol very steady and take aim. We liberals love to feel righteous and just looking at the word “Texas” makes us admire ourselves more.

So when I go there, I remind myself: whatever else you might say about it, Texas gave us Molly Ivins. Also George Jones and Roger Miller and Willie Nelson. A state that considers itself conservative and also loves Willie Nelson is a state that’s comfortable with its own contradictions.

Molly was the one who said, “I think of Texas as the laboratory for bad government.” She wrote a book about politicians, Who Let the Dogs In? She was the last of the great satirical newspaper columnists. When she died in 2007, even Dubya, the man she called Shrub, said that he missed her.

I loved my five days there. I encountered keen politeness. The truck stop guy who said, “I appreciate your business” when I paid for my two Butterfingers. The hotel clerk. I walked a long hall to my room and three cleaning ladies looked up and said, “Good morning.” When I left Austin on Monday, a man walked up to me in the airport and said quietly, “I want to thank you for all the pleasure you’ve given people over the years.”

Nobody ever said that to me before in just that graceful way. I was touched. At my age, you should’ve given some pleasure to people and he was thanking me for it, not as a fan but on behalf of people in general. Now I wish I had thrown my arms around him.

And then I came through the scanner and the lady TSA agent said, “You have a good day now, honey.” No female TSA person in New York or Minnesota would address any male over the age of eight as “honey.” She would feel marginalized if she did. But in Texas, it’s part of the culture. Not required, sweetheart, but not forbidden either.

And then there were the shows. They weren’t bad. For the first time in my life, I got up the courage to sing a George Jones song in public, “He Stopped Loving Her Today” and it was okay. I led the audience in singing a cappella “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” and “Faded Love” and Jimmie Rodgers’s “T for Texas” with the yodel ­­— 1,600 people yodeling, it was thrilling — but what made me and the whole Prairie Home Companion gang happy was that all those people came Expecting To Have A Whee of A Time. Their hair was on fire from the get-go. In Minnesota, audiences tend to feel dutiful, as if they’re all related to me and felt obliged to come and just hope it won’t be too embarrassing.

I met Molly once when I went to Texas for a party in her honor and she picked me up at the airport in her pickup. She was easy to talk to, full of beans, we were like old pals as soon as we left the parking ramp. I loved being back in her state last week. Rest in peace, dear Molly, and rise in glory.

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I’m an old man but not utterly clueless and as I hear music come out of the ceiling, I hear rap and hip-hop become monosyllabic, a string of shouts and macho mumbles with machinelike percussion, a sort of anti-music, and then along comes a young woman who sings actual stories in whole sentences to a real melody and you have Taylor Swift and she takes over the music business and becomes the most famous person on earth, bigger than Vladimir Putin. When Putin fills a stadium, you know it was at gunpoint. Mister Marlago fills small plazas but it’s all the same people, mostly retirees with time on their hands who love hearing that same speech over and over. Taylor draws huge paying crowds who are overjoyed from start to finish and also buy the merch and go home happy.

I accept the fact that I am a back issue, a relic, and that younger people have taken over. Eight years ago I played the Hollywood Bowl; a few weeks ago I played a 200-seater in Menomonie, Wisconsin. It was fun. People in the seats talked back to me. We hung out in the lobby afterward. I caught influenza from one of them. Do Taylor’s fans get to share their germs with her? I doubt it very much.

I accept change, even some changes that pain me. I grew up reading newspapers and now they’re dying by the hundreds and the reason is simple: most of them tend to be solemn, pretentious, humorless, and so people prefer social media — the Comments can be wildly feisty and sarcastic. I admire George F. Will’s column and I also enjoy the hundreds of lefties throwing spitballs at him. You don’t find much irreverence in newspapers anymore. They’re rather sedate, like nursing homes.

I accept ageism. Joe Biden is, in fact, 81 and so am I. We can put on a glove but we’re not likely to turn a double play. Our ballet careers are long past. We need help with computers. Too bad. I see young women tapping out texts on their cellphones at 40 words per minute — with their thumbs!!! I hunt and peck at 5 wpm with my index finger and I mak los f speling rrors.

As an old man, I repent of visiting my generation’s sins on the grandkids. I like the idea of the young starting out more or less fresh and in the clear. Conservatives make a powerful case against my generation providing generous benefits for itself and passing on the check to our grandkids. I like to think of America as looking forward to the morning and the next new opportunity, not dragging the chains of the past.

I belong to a privileged class, now almost vanished, of Americans who could pay for their college education working part-time minimum-wage jobs. That was the beautiful idea of the land-grant university: you didn’t have to ask Dad’s help or pay attention to his plans for you. When I was 18, my father told me loud and clear that he wouldn’t foot the bill for the U and I took that as the privilege of independence. Now a year at the University of Minnesota costs upward of twenty-two grand and it’s hard to earn that at $10/hour and still get your sleep and write your term paper on Moby-Dick.

It’s a tragedy to cheat the kids of an education and run them through the maze and badger them into grinding out the assignments, and they line up in caps and gowns without ever finding the light switch. It’s your first chance to find out what your soul might make of your life. Jefferson believed that enlightenment is the foundation of freedom and that learning is happiness and happiness is at the heart of democracy.

So let’s take a cue from Miss Swift and turn away from dread and dismay and other ill-informed opinions and put on some glitter and allow exuberance to have its way with us. Let’s tell stories in whole sentences. Let’s talk about love. Let the cranks and killjoys camp in the saloon and soak in their own sour juices and let’s go to the dance, my dears. Baseball season is coming. Let’s give the umps a hard time and cheer for the home boys and have a beer and a brat with mustard. Let’s live life and not grouse about it. By the way, I love it when you smile. You look good.

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It is Lent, the season meant for us to meditate upon our wayward ways, even us Episcopalians whom you rarely find falling down drunk in the gutter or shoplifting at Walgreens or getting into fistfights — no, for us failing to write thank-you notes is major — but still we have our shortcomings, which, I must say, are clearer to me this week when my wife the violist is away playing Beethoven for a ballet in Minneapolis. Without her here, my life goes slack, I sometimes spend all day in pajamas, my mind jumps from one lily pad to another, I can’t focus. My room is a mess, the bed is a tangle of bedclothes.

My grandma Dora always made her bed upon arising, believing it lent order to the day. She was a seamstress, schoolteacher, railroad telegrapher, farm wife, mother of eight. Her bread was light and crusty. She had firm habits: she drank Postum, ate Grape-Nuts, slept with the window open for fresh air, and she was a progressive Methodist who believed that women and persons of color were the equal of white men and that science could solve many of our problems. Compared to Grandma, I am a hopeless mess. I mean it.

She was born in 1880. I came along 62 years later, a member of the Silent Generation, though I never hear anybody use that term: maybe that’s how we got the name. I was born nine months and ten minutes after Pearl Harbor. I was conceived out of hope for the future. The Silents gave you the civil rights movement, many rock bands, some still performing, and various hallucinogens that inspired a lot of really bad poetry, and now we are very very old.

Grandma’s generation didn’t have a name, they just had high standards. All the nonsense we read about boomers, millennials, Gen X, Gen Z, is a bushel basket of chicken feathers. My wife is a boomer but she has more in common with Grandma than most boomers I know. I wish the two of them had met: Grandma would’ve loved her. Grandma loved to “visit,” as they referred to conversation back then, and so does Jenny.

Meanwhile, we Silents are a drag on the country, enjoying generous pensions while Medicare picks up the tab for buckets of pharmaceuticals and whatever fancy surgical procedures we desire, running up deficits that Gen X will be smacked by when they reach 65. There are 65 million of them and many of them may need to harvest aluminum cans and glass bottles for a living or become security persons making sure nobody enters the exits at airports. They had hoped to be successful singer-songwriters and this will be a major comedown for them. They’ll need antidepressants and Medicare won’t cover those anymore.

The Silent was the truly fortunate generation. Smokes cost 35¢ a pack and a Jack Daniels on the rocks not much more. I put myself through college working as a part-time dishwasher and parking lot attendant at minimum wage. My first apartment rented for $80/month. Hitchhiking was a reliable means of transportation. The economy gave me the freedom to screw up and so I became a writer. I sold a story for $500 and we lived on that for more than a month.

My wayward ways that I contemplate during Lent are not so different from yours — I know my failures as a friend and father and husband, but my line of work, which is writing and performing for small loyal audiences, has enabled me to disappoint so many more people than if I’d been a chiropractor or a yoga instructor. I think of this. I was put here to make people happy and sometimes it just doesn’t work out right. Sometimes I get a standing ovation and then see it’s a standing and leaving ovation. So I contemplate these mistakes during Lent.

As I write this, it’s 5 a.m. and my beloved has returned from Beethoven and is asleep in the next room. I am dressed. The day lies ahead. I will go with her to a museum to look at Byzantine art. We will eat greens for lunch. We will visit. I feel hopeful that I will write something worthy today. If not today, tomorrow. This is what we Christians live on, hope. Be cheerful, dear reader, and forge ahead. Put your regrets aside after due consideration and proceed to do what you were put here to do. Be good at it. Or good enough, and tomorrow aim for better.

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Before it dies, I want to come out in favor of the hyperloop project in Minnesota to create underground tubes in which people would travel in capsules propelled by electromagnetic force at speeds up to 700 mph. No seat belts, no use of carbon fuel, no roaring engines or jarring bumps. They’re proposing a link between Minneapolis/St. Paul and Rochester, 85 miles, which by my calculation will take about 7 and ½ minutes, or one cup of coffee, whereas now it takes 90 some minutes, or about the length of the opera “Hansel and Gretel” if you include the search for a parking spot and the hike to where your appointment is.

Minnesota’s, of course, would only be an experiment, which, if successful, could be extended and thereby make the country smaller — three hours from Chicago to L.A. but without the pollution — and eventually you might eliminate the vast underpopulated middle, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, the Dakotas, Nevada, Wyoming, and Montana, which would become one huge federal agricultural reserve, run by the Department of Agriculture, tended by migrant workers, no need for towns and cities. Kansas has 105 counties, a pointless bureaucracy ruling over wheat and soybean fields. Farming is heavily subsidized by the feds anyway and in the name of efficiency, why not let them run it, allocating acreage based on nutrition, convert wasteful grazing lands to vegetable crops. Eliminating those states would reduce the U.S. Senate by 20 seats, which could only improve it, and likely send the Republican Party careening into history, which it has been seeking for some time now. And who can name the last great senator from Kansas or South Dakota?

Okay, maybe I took the idea too far. I apologize. But why do people still want to go to the moon? We’ve been there, done that. Let’s do amazing stuff here on earth.

The hyperloops would be good for the environment, good for government, good for the American people. There’s a mood of dark defeatism hanging over the land, and we could use a dramatic technological miracle to renew our self-confidence.

This would be a modern equivalent of the Pacific Railway Act of 1862 by which Congress pushed the transcontinental railroad forward. My great-great-grandfather David Powell headed from Missouri to Colorado by horse-drawn wagon around that time, a heroic venture, and in 1869 the transcontinental was completed, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific meeting in Promontory, Utah. Wagon travel took months and the railroad reduced that to days. It came at great cost, land grants to railroads, brutal working conditions for crews, but the effect was to make us, psychologically, one country, the Union, as secured at Shiloh and Antietam and Gettysburg.

The country needs something marvelous and fascinating to disperse the current gloom. The Republican House of today is a different animal from the Republican House of 1862, night and day different: the one in 1862 established the Homestead Act that let David file a claim for 160 acres, the Morrill Act that created land-grant universities that enabled many of his descendants to get a higher education. The current edition is a carnival of practical jokers by comparison.

David was a Republican as was my great-grandfather James. He believed in progress and went to the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 to see the first electric train, the electric car, Ferris wheel, and to taste peanut butter, Cream of Wheat, the brownie, the Hershey bar, Juicy Fruit gum, for the first time. My grandma was 13 at the time and was disappointed to be left at home: she was an optimist and believed in progress too.

I have a Republican streak in me too and I feel it when I take a cab from the airport across Manhattan to the West Side and I pass the little shops and storefronts, the little bodegas and coffee shops, the tailor, the mom-and-pop bakery, the fruit stand, and I breathe a silent prayer for the family enterprise, the kids who work there, the perils of going up against Amazon, the crucial virtues of ingenuity and economy and amiability and also confidence.

I’m an independent entrepreneur too. I do shows and I write books. I’ve been doing it a long time. Sometimes I feel discouraged but then comes a morning when I wake up early feeling ambitious and eager to get to work. Our country needs more mornings like those. Being whooshed halfway across the country pollution-free in a couple hours has the Ferris wheel and Juicy Fruit gum beat by a mile.

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A splendiferous snow fell on Manhattan a few days ago, seven inches, a new bright world, school was canceled and soon neighborhood children were hauling their sleds and saucers into Central Park to go sliding.

Sliding is something an old man avoids but I remember the pleasure of lubricity — tobogganing down a steep slope and out onto the Mississippi ice where we could skate upwind and then open our jackets for a sail and go flying home. We flooded a rink in a vacant lot and played hockey and somebody’s dad hauled an old chicken coop over with a woodstove in it for a warming house. And I may be idealizing now but I do remember a spirit of chumminess and good cheer in that warm house on bitter cold days. Bad kids chose to suppress their malevolent tendencies; subzero weather made them sort of sensible.

I miss sliding and skating, the aimlessness of it. I’ve been awfully industrious for a long time and could stand to have more fun. I spend too much time in airports being yelled at by TSA kids and boarding a plane to somewhere, which is just a school bus with snacks.

This is a male urge, I do believe. The women I know tend to business and worry about family finances and the future of the planet. Men never completely get over adolescence; strains of it remain, a need to blow things up or to throw a rotten tomato at someone or hold a lit match to another man’s rear end as he flatulates. Years ago, when I lived in Copenhagen, American friends came to visit now and then and the women wanted to see castles and the men wanted to see beaches where people lie around naked. They couldn’t come right out and say so, lest women roll their eyes and say, “Oh, grow up.” Probably women told Rubens and Botticelli and Michelangelo to grow up, but they went ahead and created great art based on their fascination with nakedness. I grew up among people who associated nudity with moral laxity, so it has appeal for me.

We are a gender that likes to mess around. I miss shooting baskets. Solitaire. I miss sitting around drinking coffee, which we did back in the Office Era but now everyone works at home.

I’m in the mood to take a long aimless car trip and write a book about the people I meet. Writing would make this a deductible business expense. I still enjoy writing, thanks to the fact that no serious critic ever thought I was an important writer. I know writers who were once hailed as heavyweights and now struggle to write a whole paragraph. Nobody ever described my stuff as “provocative and profound,” the most I ever got was “amusing yet often poignant,” which is not a pedestal, it’s a low curb.

My title for the book is “The Old Man in the Blue Dodge Pickup” and so I need to find a blue Dodge pickup and then I’m ready to go. I’m going to head out of New York and make my way southwest on two-lane highways into deep red America and I’ll carry boxes of my book “Guy Poems” and stop along the way and put up a sign — “Guy Poems, $5” — and see who stops to have a look.

I have a poem about urination — “Women are more circumspect but men can piss with great effect, with terrible hydraulic force, can make a stream or change its course, put out fires and cigarettes, and sometime laying down our bets, late at night outside the bars, we like to aim up at the stars” — and a poem about sperm — “The sperm is no boob, when he smells the fallopian tube, he goes into some crazy figure eights about a thousand times as those female enzymes keep egging him on to penetrate” — and other subjects of a guyistic nature, and I hope to have friendly encounters with guys about guy things.

I believe that once you cross over into 80, you need to set the newspaper aside when possible and get off your high horse and find simple plain pleasure in your declining years. Cousin Dan flies his glider, cousin Joyce studies Scripture and researches family history, cousin Richard makes stained-glass windows, brother Stan files appeals for prison inmates, and I write poems about the unpoetic. I’ve never owned a blue Dodge pickup. We were Ford people. I am looking around at the want ads.

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Joe Biden came to Manhattan for a couple fundraisers last week, which gave the NYPD a fine excuse to close off as many streets as humanly possible, which is why some people go into law enforcement — for the chance to make civilians stand behind barriers — and there I stood, looking at York Avenue, abandoned except for a few cop cars, lights flashing. I’d crossed over from the West Side in a cab driven by a cabbie who’d been at it for 39 years and who was highly irritated by the blockages, also said the economy’s tanking, shops closing, people abandoning the city, crime up, Wall Street in trouble, but at the same time, he said, “It’s Number One, the greatest city in the world.”

New Yorkers have this ability, to express despair and municipal pride in the same sentence. I over-tipped him and hiked 12 blocks to my doctor who took my blood pressure and said it was excellent, so I owe Joe for getting me to exercise. I was so surprised though by his language describing his likely November opponent, which I read in a paper I won’t name, a two-word term, a participle of concupiscence modifying a word for a common human orifice. Joe, unlike the other guy, is a churchgoer and if my chest had a bazoom, I would clutch it, but it doesn’t, not yet. I just wonder, where are we headed?

I was brought up in a nice home with clean sheets, where never a door was slammed nor did my family use bad language — we even shrank at the euphemisms — and so, one day not long ago, sitting in Starbucks, the stool slid out from under me and I spilled half a large latte in my lap and I said — this is a direct quote — “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” It was the voice of my mother, still in my head though she’s been gone for years and I am now only 16 years younger than she and hoping to catch up.

There have been times when I’ve used the words that are available for dismay at hot coffee in your lap but I think those words have worn thin for me. I have friends who use obscenities the way other people use commas and I ignore it because they’re good people and I love them. I hear pop lyrics that make Lennon & McCartney seem like Lovelace and Milton, and I just ask the waiter to move me to a quieter corner. It’s noise.

Well, I tell myself, people do have strong feelings. I had some myself a few years ago. But a person comes to an age when you wake up in the morning and this fact alone is worthy of note and so is the sun shining in the window. The coffeemaker works beautifully. And there is a beloved person who rises from her bed and sits on my lap, her head against mine. And I haven’t driven cab for the past 39 years, nor did I ever need to teach Creative Writing to earn my daily bread.

I hear that Taylor Swift’s upcoming album is called “The Tortured Poets Department.” I hope she means this ironically but I worry that it may inspire millions of young women to write formless verse about the meaninglessness of their mornings and the agony of their afternoons. I just want Taylor to be happy and for us to be happy for her. If the tight end makes her happy, fine, otherwise loose ends can be fun too.

Don’t torture yourself. Turn away from brooding over the slights and shortcomings of your life and devote yourself to the limerick as I do.

The poet Sylvia Plath

Was filled with misery and wrath.

The day she dove

Headfirst in the stove,

She should’ve just had a hot bath.

Miss Austen, the beautiful Jane,

Had an overly sensitive brain.

She needed a guy

To give her the eye

And lead her in out of the rain.

Kafka was lonely in Prague

And lived in a neurotic fog,

Groaning and keening

And longing for meaning —

He should’ve just gotten a dog.

Do you get my drift, people? The streets are blocked, people are infuriated, an old cabdriver is pouring out his anxieties to me as we sit, the meter running, but I get out and walk and it turns out to be good for the heart. Try it.

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