Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 18

My beloved and I live in a large co-op building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that I bought in 1987 and from our terrace we can look up to the apartment where Sinclair Lewis lived in his alcoholic distress before going away to die in Italy in 1951 and farther up is Faye Dunaway’s old apartment with panoramic views of the city. She resided there when she was having an affair with the Italian heartthrob Marcello Mastroianni — Marshmallow Macaroni, we used to call him — and where she, in a fit of fury because he wouldn’t marry her, threw his clothes off the 20th-floor balcony to sail down onto the brownstone roofs. A neighbor told me about it who’d gotten the scoop from a previous resident, since departed. Faye screamed a name at him and heaved two armloads of shirts and pants and they went fluttering down like a flock of dying butterflies. “It was a good thing he wasn’t in one of the shirts at the time or she would’ve heaved him over in person,” the neighbor said. “I went out and found a couple in the ramp going down to the garage and they are just my size, one orange, one green stripes, not exactly my style but they make me feel like a Somebody.”

So from our terrace, I look up and remind myself to stay off alcohol except for Communion and avoid the sadness of Lewis’s end. He kept cranking out novels in his old age but people had had enough of him especially as he got old and out of touch with the current scene and the work got more cartoonish.

But I put the bottle aside twenty-some years ago, not wanting my cheerful little girl to see her daddy drunk, a powerful motivator, and whiskey has lost its appeal. I walk past liquor stores and don’t slow down to have a look.

No, what troubles me now is the amiable state of my marriage. I can’t remember the last time my sweetheart slammed a door or raised her voice to me. A woman would have to be passionately in love with a man to throw armloads of his shirts off a 20th-floor balcony. Marshmallow’s offense was refusing to divorce his wife, Bella, back in Italy and marry Faye. He ate his cake and had it too. Faye wanted him for herself, didn’t want to be a sleepover pal, a flame, a paramour or playmate. She wanted to be Mrs. Macaroni. Throwing his shirts overboard was a dramatic attempt to make him naked and therefore dependent on her but apparently he had plenty more shirts where those came from. He calmed her down by speaking Italian to her, a great language for pacifying your lover. I long ago memorized the lines Tu solo sei il mio vero amore, sei il mio sole e la mia luna, il mio pane e il mio vino, la bellezza dei miei giorni e l’estasi delle mie notti if ever she storms out of the roomscreaming and heads for my clothes closet, but it hasn’t happened.

There have been times of irritation when I let the shower overflow or I set a hot coffee on a tabletop, scarring it forever, when I’ve spoken the lines in English, “You alone are my one true love, my sun and my moon,” et cetera. But we’re a calm couple.

And now I think back and realize that no woman has ever loved me as Faye loved Marshmallow. I have disappointed a number of women, two by marrying them and two by not, but nobody has so much as thrown my hat off a balcony or a tie or pair of shoelaces.

I am told that Faye’s closet demolition did not end the Macaroni affair. I am told that soon thereafter the downstairs neighbors could hear that master bed slip-sliding back and forth across the tile floor accompanied by cries of delight. And that is why I long for a big blowup between us — the beauty of reconciliation, the heartbreak leading to rapture.

I’m not Italian but I know a good deal when I see one. My closet is open, my darling. Most of my clothes are old, out of fashion, stained, too small; I’d be happy if you cleaned it out from end to end. I need to be Dunawayed and then ­­— shirtless, shoeless, depantsed, let me be yours forever and a day.

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The great debate continues over Flaco the eagle-owl spotted recently flying around our home on New York’s Upper West Side, a year after he got loose from the Central Park Zoo: should he continue to roam the city freely, feeding on rats, or should he be put back in captivity for his own welfare?

He’s a big bird, six-foot wingspan, bright orange eyes, and he’s gained a considerable fan base, most of whom are rooting for him to be free. Some renowned owlologists, however, feel the bird is in danger, primarily from rat poison but also from vehicular birdicide, and needs to be rescued from his urban habitat.

Apparently Flaco is roaming the city widely, in search of a mate, which he is extremely unlikely to find in Manhattan, even if he turns out to be gay. There was a female eagle-owl, Gladys, at a zoo in Minnesota but she escaped and was run over by a truck. Eurasian eagle-owls (Bubo bubo) are found in Russia and Asia, not migratory to a great extent; Flaco was hatched at a bird center in North Carolina 14 years ago. Life expectancy is 20 years but eagle-owls can live much longer in captivity, 30, perhaps more, and there’s the question: a short life of adventure or a long, pleasant life in captivity.

I voted for captivity 30 years ago when I met my Gladys and I’m quite happy with it, so I vote for female eagle-owls, Flo, Mavis, Delores, Maureen, to be flown in from Asia and tethered in the Park where Flaco can spot them, and when he dives in to select a mate, the orni-cops can jump in and seize him in flagrante delicto.

The Times published a video of Flaco, the day after his escape, huddled by Fifth Avenue, freaked out by the P.D. lights flashing and the zoo people hovering, looking at a small cage set on the sidewalk with a dead rat inside it, door open, beckoning, but Flaco declined to be trapped. He took off, figured out how to hunt, found good perches and safe corners to sleep in, and became a New York celebrity. New Yorkers have a romantic streak that admires the vagabond adventurer and the rebel. I got over that romantic streak when I saw dozens of adventurous heroes die in middle age from drugs and alcohol, bad habits, and invincible stupidity.

I’ve now been free of my Gladys for several weeks and I admit that freedom has its benefits. Nobody has said to me, “You’re spilling that coffee” or “You missed the toilet again” or “Turn down the flame, you’re spattering grease all over the kitchen” or “Don’t put so much detergent in the washer, you’ll have soap flowing all over the floor” but on the other hand, had she been here, she’d have told me, “Wear a mask when you’re in a crowd of people, there’s a terrible bug going around” and I might’ve done it but instead I went out, a free man, and freely inhaled viral droplets, and caught influenza B and spent the next ten days as a man of 98, a prisoner in a gulag of self-inflicted misery.

I miss her. I miss her casual hand on my shoulder in passing that says so much. I can put my hand on my shoulder but not in passing and it isn’t the same. We need to take care of each other. I need my editors and my colleagues to do the heavy lifting so I can have fun at work. My Gladys loves her family and her fellow string players in the orchestra and especially her Estonian stand partner. In a few days I’ll go to Florida and sing Van Morrison and Greg Brown and Iris DeMent in duet with Aoife and Christine. An old friend of mine is recovering from spinal fusion surgery at a hospital in Minnesota, in the ICU under the watchful care of truly dedicated doctors and nurses. My daughter lives in a tangle of friends and chums and BFFs who all look after each other. Knowing this helps me sleep at night.

We can get along without Wi-Fi and cellphones and streaming video, but we can’t get along without each other. Come back to the zoo, Flaco. You’re a celebrity, people want to look at you, accept your role in the world. You’ll enjoy a long, pleasant life there along with the penguins and the primates. You lunch on one sick rat and you’re a goner and the whole city will go into mourning. Come home.

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Aging is a beautiful natural process, the wisdom gained, the growing sense of gratitude, the amusement of seeing young people make your same dumb mistakes, but one thing that bothers me is the difficulty of putting on underpants while standing and not leaning against a doorpost. It’s a graceful moment, left leg held high and poked through the hole, then the right, freestanding, no wobbling, which I’ve done since I was a kid, and now at 81 I can sometimes still perform the trick, but then comes a bad experience — the left foot catches the underpants crotch and you lose your balance and suddenly you’re headed for a tragic accident.

I do not want my obit to read “The author died at home of a concussion, while trying to pull on his briefs. No foul play was suspected.” And so after a near fall, I sit down on the bed and practice safety, but still there is a sense of loss. Trousers are easier but not without risk.

Along the same line, my beloved has behooved me to sit on the toilet while emptying my bladder and I try to comply. There have been occasions when I stood to whiz and didn’t hear urine hitting water — no, for some reason I was pissing sideways into the bathtub, which can be a problem in a marriage: no matter how hard he tries, a man can never clean up wayward urine to the satisfaction of his wife. I try to explain to her that a male animal uses urine to mark his territory but she doesn’t buy that. So I sit. But I feel a diminution of manhood.

In the morning when I shower, if she is not nearby, I allow my bladder to open, a beautiful feeling of freedom, but once she saw me and cried, “What are you doing??” — knowing perfectly well what I was doing, I was exercising a manly right, standing under a waterfall and letting go, which takes me back to Boy Scouts and the camping trip to Lake Vermilion where four of us Scouts stood in a row, barn doors open, to see who could urinate the highest. This is a pleasure denied to women, so far as I know.

These are small setbacks, however, and I don’t dwell on them. The great question remains, now as when I was 17, perhaps even more clearly now: what am I here on earth for? What is my purpose? I did a show in Kansas in January after which I met a man named Barry who is a freelance Christian pastor, nondenominational, an independent, there with his wife and daughters, old fans of mine who suddenly became friends.

I said, “I hope you have an IRA.” He said, “The Lord will provide.” The man was secure in his calling. As Paul wrote to Timothy, “I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.”

I’ve met many people after shows, shaking hands, who seemed to be committed to a purpose, teachers, musicians, physicians, cops, which they didn’t mind telling me, their old radio uncle. It can be hazardous, shaking hands. I did a show in Green Bay and hung out with dozens of people and a few days later got hit by influenza B and got a week of utter misery, but so be it. Paul said, “All things work together for good to them that love God,” and if that’s not true, I don’t know what is.

My purpose in being alive is to create a lightness of spirit with words and my aim is to do this standing in front of an audience for two hours, no text, tossing off the top of my head stories and poems, songs, a murder ballad, hymns, reminiscences of grandma Keillor, Scripture, singing with the audience, a demented old man pulling out impromptu associations from deep memory, which at its best is like putting on underpants freestanding with my eyes closed, but more like skating backward, a skill I picked up on the frozen Mississippi when I was a kid.

You skate forward, like running, then swivel and suddenly you’re dancing, doing a cross-step pattern, and I, never an athlete, suddenly felt astonished by grace. A lonely stretch of river, nobody else around, it wasn’t for show but for the feeling of freedom, like a bird in flight or a fish leaping the rapids. Or a man in a shower.

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It’s good to know what true misery is as opposed to irritation, frustration, or annoyance, and now, thanks to influenza B, I am clued in. It hit suddenly last week, fever, chills, chest congestion, a hard dry cough, shivering, shaking, and a profound fatigue such that I grabbed a cane to assist me to the bathroom. Suddenly I was 98 years old. I felt I was at death’s door. I put on a sweater and lay shivering under a quilt. I slept in an upright chair to ease the coughing. I tried to order chicken soup from a deli to be delivered but they needed me to do it through PayPal, which meant creating a new PIN number to add to the twenty I already have, so I declined. Tylenol helped with the fever so I could sleep a little and in the morning I headed for the doctor’s.

I looked so pathetic that the cabdriver got out of the front seat and helped me in the back. The doctor could see I was suffering badly. A blood test revealed influenza B, and I headed home with the prescription. All in all, that’s what I call pure misery.

Irritation was when I spent 85 minutes the day before on the phone, making a hotel reservation, first online, then when that failed I spoke to a reservations agent in Honduras who spoke a sort of semi-English and was in a crowded room who then transferred me to a man who also had comprehension problems. I spoke in my clearest radio announcer voice. I did not use profanity though it would’ve been satisfying. But I am used to the phenomenon of big corporations bidding out customer service to cheap labor in foreign countries rather than hire young people from Indiana or Ohio who would demand a living wage. It’s not a good policy to make your customers irritated and I don’t plan to stay in stay in a Marriott hotel ever again, but so what?

It was frustrating the same day to delete junk e-mails, almost a hundred of them, and then suddenly Gmail twitched and undeleted them and I had to go back to Go. Technology should be a convenience, not an annoyance.

But influenza B put everything in perspective. Nearby druggists didn’t have the prescribed drug in stock but because I was dealing with robots, they simply said, “We’re working on it.” Hours later I called and got a human being who said, “We don’t have it.”

I was in bad shape, hardly able to walk across the room, nesting in a straight-backed chair to ease the violent coughing, and finally in a desperate moment I called my friend Gretchen who was busy giving a flute lesson and on her way to a board meeting but dropped everything, made some phone calls, got her friend Joshua to make a run over to the East Side to a shop that had the Xofluza the doctor prescribed for me, and a couple hours later there he was at my door, a tall young man with a head of big black hair, a record producer (she told me) who’s done a couple of Bruce Springsteen albums and who lives in my building, eight floors up. It’s good to know that Bruce works with nice people.

I was miserable Thursday and somewhat less so on Friday but something in the drug electrified my mind and when I closed my eyes I saw mysterious diagrams, documents, letters, landscapes, all incomprehensible, which made it hard to fall asleep, until I discovered that J.S. Bach’s organ chorales, played softly on the CD player next to the bed, worked perfectly, dismissed the nonsense, restored reason.

And on Saturday I felt better. Not healed but more or less myself, rather than the cranky 98-year-old wacko on the verge of being hauled away to Happydale.

“Where is his wife, for God’s sake?” you ask. She is in St. Paul, working, being an orchestra violist. She offered to quit and come home and I said, No, absolutely not. Why should she be miserable watching me be miserable? One misery is enough. But do this, my friend: look down the list of contacts on your phone and ask, “Whom would I call to go halfway across town one evening to get me the drug I need?” Make sure you have a Gretchen. When I recover I hope to become one myself. Or a Joshua.

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I was riding home from the cardiologist’s in a taxi and heard a woman on the radio say that if you see a bird lying on the sidewalk, you shouldn’t ignore it, you should pick it up gently and move its legs — if the bird reacts, it’s alive, and may recover, so you might put it in a paper sack and carry it to a warm place and if it’s wounded, you could take it to a wild bird shelter.

I had never heard this advice before and I was impressed. The cab was wending through heavy traffic in Manhattan and the thought of someone stopping to give first aid to a bird seems unlikely to me. Maybe in a children’s book, but in New York, no. I say this as someone who’s fallen three times in New York, tripped on a curb once, hit a low-hanging limb once, tripped on uneven pavement, and each time, within three seconds, strangers rushed to my side, asked if I was okay, offered a hand. God has His Eye on the sparrow so I believe He watches over you and me, but New Yorkers are busy people with a lot on their minds.

The night before I’d had dinner with friends, one of whom got quite wrought up about her crazy elderly relatives and said, “I don’t have time for your insanity! Take it someplace else!” which I completely understand.

I went to the cardiologist to get a stress test to see if my heart is still working okay, walked fast on the slanted treadmill with wires stuck to my chest, kept going, wanted to say “Stop!” and didn’t, considered collapsing and didn’t, and finally the machine stopped, and it turns out that my heart isn’t leaking, blood pressure is good. A leaking heart would’ve been a good excuse to become a semi-invalid, which I could be good at. I am not a hiker, jogger, biker, skier, or weight lifter. Doing squats isn’t my idea of a good time. I’ve avoided gyms ever since I was 18. My idea of exercise is stretching while I wait for the elevator. I’m too proud to hail an electric cart at the airport and ask for a lift to a distant gate, but I’ve wanted to. Oh, yes. Yes, indeed.

The clinical term for this is simple laziness. I was an indolent child, a lazy student, and my love of inertia led me into a broadcasting career where no skill is required, amiability is enough. Friends of mine became talented guitarists, which is hard work, hard on your hands; I just talked for a living and every so often I put my fingers on the QWERTYUIOP keyboard and wrote a novel or something. It was fun. Years went by and I kept expecting to be punished for my lethargy and lack of ambition and it never happened.

I am related to good workers, my niece the nurse, my cousin the architect, my daughter is a rock climber, my wife once ran a marathon, my grandson is a canoeist and hiker. All I do is speak in whole sentences, some of which are considered humorous by some people.

Do I feel guilty about this? Of course I do. And I know that I need to get off my duff and man up and go out and walk lest I become a burden to my sweetheart and wind up in a rest home and use taxpayers’ money to pay for me to lie around all day watching TV.

So I’m thinking about becoming an avian EMT, walking the streets of Manhattan, looking for prostrate birds, twitching their legs, putting them in paper bags, taking them to a bird ER. Other people have their ideas about how to change the world — recycling, songwriting, investigative journalism, teaching kids to read — but I’m wondering if kindness isn’t the answer to many of our problems — no man stands so tall as when he bends to help a bird. And instead of walking the streets myself, I think I should start a noble organization, Pigeon Patrol, and inspire others to walk the streets and I will be the Executive Director and write a mission statement and fundraise online and hold an annual gala at which I will pay tribute to our patrollers and remind our donors of our high purpose, to change the tone of urban life through an organization that is truly for the birds.

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Winter can hit a person hard and when we drop down to zero and below and the wind is out of the north, I walk the deserted streets, no sign of civilization, just blinking red lights, and come home and see in the window the reflection of a wreck of a man, and I think, “Nobody knows you when it’s ten below. I am old and I am tired and my credit cards are all expired. Got no friends who I can call, and the doctor says, No alcohol.”

I walked into a nice restaurant in Minneapolis last week, full of people drinking novelty cocktails and eating expensive food, and the music coming out of the ceiling was all metallic percussion and persistent repetitive unmusical phrases, it was like eating dinner in a machine shop, and I felt like all of American culture is headed toward trash and corruption. And then you read the poll that shows that one-fourth of all Americans believe that the FBI was responsible for the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, and you think the stupidification of America is maybe a conspiracy of foreign-born otolaryngologists who examine the larynx by threading a thin scope up your nostril and what’s to prevent them from injecting a dumbing drug into your brain? You go to their office suffering from sinus problems and you come out believing that electric dishwashers cause erectile dysfunction.

And then I went South to get some warmth and while there I had a brilliant idea, my first in a long time. It’s a doable task that will make our beloved country a more cheerful place.

The South is littered with memorial battlefields, state parks and memorials and the federal acreage — 4,600 acres at Chancellorsville, 9,500 acres at Chickamauga, 5,000 at Manassas, 2,500 at Vicksburg, rows of rusting cannon, and then the monstrosity that is Gettysburg, a 6,000-acre junkyard of obsolescent obelisks and meaningless mind-numbing monuments and sentimental statuary, a National Park of Bad Art, so cluttered it’s hard to walk through and imagine the ferocious battle that took place. Very few people under the age of 60 care about the war it commemorates, and the junk should all be trucked away to a landfill and the land developed into nice neighborhoods with hiking trails and flower gardens and finally put Pickett’s Charge and the Lost Cause behind us and go on to more interesting things. You want a memorial, put up a podium on the spot where Abe Lincoln gave his speech and let visitors press PLAY and listen to it.

This is our inheritance from the weepy Victorians, plus the vast graveyards in Queens and Brooklyn with thousands of stone angels that you pass on your way to the airport and never see a single soul except the caretakers. It’s so sad: the wasted space devoted to mummification, the toxicity of embalming fluids, the memorializing of the ordinary where instead children should be playing games and riding their bikes.

We need to commemorate heroic acts of invention and creativity that have improved our lives vastly over those of our ancestors. I see that Microsoft has a little museum at its campus in Redmond, WA, and there are various rock and roll museums. I’ve googled around for a museum celebrating the first successful open-heart surgical operation, which took place at the University of Minnesota in 1952, a great technological feat that has extended the lives of millions, including me, and I don’t find it.

Is there a Google museum somewhere? There’s a Motown Museum in Detroit but it sounds like more of a gift shop than museum. Muddy Waters’s old house in Chicago is now a museum, which is good, but more needs to be done. You set aside 6,000 acres in Pennsylvania to preserve the high-water mark of the wretched Confederacy — why not take that land and create a park devoted to the music of Black people who made the world dance and gave it soul? Nobody knows you when you’re down and out. Everybody needs someone to love. So rock me, mama, rock me. And I’ll fly away, O glory.

Where Lee had his ass whipped, let’s make an amphitheater and every day a crowd gather and sing, “Let’s go down to the river and pray, studying about that good old way, and who shall wear the starry crown? Good Lord, show me the way.” O sister, let’s go down to the river and pray.” And now I’m going in and get warm.

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It is disconcerting to watch our blessed country tear itself apart and to see so many public figures, both left and right, committed to permanent dread and dismay, but I did feel that the January cold snap was a very good thing. Our autumnal December was disorienting and then I was in Kansas to do a show when the polar blast hit, a bracing Antarctic chill, and I felt the wind off the prairie — like being whacked by a two-by-four. It was a moment of reality and one is grateful for that. It was as if the planet was saying, “I’ve heard enough of your bellyaching about politics and the price of gasoline and social media and the state of public education — let me show you what actual suffering is like.” A warm van was waiting to take me back to the hotel. I was profoundly grateful.

The next morning I sat eating generic scrambled eggs and sausage and fell into convivial conversation with a couple from Oklahoma who were in Kansas for a friend’s wedding. I believe conviviality is more common when the temperature drops into single digits: total strangers drawn to each other by mutual suffering. “Traumatic bonding” it’s called. The two of them were hunters and gun-lovers. “Praise the Lord,” I thought. My friendship demographic has gotten awfully narrow as I careen into old age — I know too many English majors, no farmers or truck drivers — and it had been ages since I last conversed with gun-lovers: we don’t have many on the West Side of Manhattan. I enjoyed meeting them. They were very very nice people. She has an arthritic right shoulder and likes the AR-15 because it doesn’t have the recoil of other rifles. He is mechanically minded and loves the weapon’s design and precision. I put my oar in and mentioned that I feel safer in New York City with its large number of Unitarians and Reform Jews, all of them unarmed, than in Minnesota, and that I miss the old days before public schools became fortresses. They nodded. They hunt because it provides them with excellent meat with no nitrites or other additives, which they like. We parted on friendly terms.

I think the arctic blast facilitated our civility with persons whose opinions are crosswise to our own. The Florida boy who is setting the tone of incivility is no mystery: he is thriving, as cult leaders always have, by giving his followers an enemy, by setting brother against brother. He thrives on being despised by millions of people; the critical media is going down the Up escalator and he laughs at them in passing.

The Oklahomans said goodbye and I took a look at the Times, the headline “On the Ballot in Iowa: Fear. Anxiety. Hopelessness.” It made me happy not to be an Iowa Republican. I lived in Bettendorf for a year when I was a toddler and my life has gotten better and better ever since I left. I’m not especially fearful except that RFKJ might walk up, hand extended, and I’d feel obliged to shake it. I used to be anxious about dying young but now I’m 81. Like most Americans I am a stranger to hopelessness. Hopelessness is not a good motive for falling in love, raising children, or writing a novel. Or for voting.

The decent thing to do if you’re hopeless is to get good and drunk and stagger down the street spouting nonsense about vaccine and the FBI and see if anyone cares to put you into treatment. If not, problem solved.

At the airport, looking around the terminal and seeing all the flight cancellations and delays, I could see how cheerfully Midwesterners react to mutual inconvenience. It brings out the best in us. Clumps of strangers stood around happily complaining. One band of travelers had been stuck on a plane for several hours because the boarding door froze shut. I could see that this story would be told to everyone they meet in the next two weeks.

I’ve been doing shows on the road during this latest era of discontent and out of simple stubbornness I’ve walked out onstage and hummed a note and sung “America” and “America the Beautiful” and the audience was happy to sing with me. My audience includes some prickly conservatives and a good many condescending liberals and broken-hearted woke but they all know the words, and they sing beautifully together. Florida Boy begins his rallies with recorded music: not many people know the words, it’s just noise.

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You only live once and once is enough if you do it right. I told myself this the other morning as I decided to have a piece of toast with orange marmalade because when I warmed up my coffee and put the milk carton back in the fridge, there was the marmalade looking at me, a high-grade marmalade as I could see by the fact it had a French name and had bits of citrus in it and I reached for it thanks to fond associations going back to my childhood. Grandpa was from the tenements of Glasgow and for him orange marmalade was a luxury of the privileged classes and so eating it was to rise above your assigned station in life if only for a few minutes.

I put the bread in the toaster and now I wonder who invented this fabulous little ordinary machine so I google it and the toaster, it turns out, was developed in stages by several men between 1893 and 1919 when a Minnesotan named Charles Strite came up with the pop-up toaster. And so the toast pops up and I butter it and spread marmalade on it, not Walmart marmalade but imported, such as royalty would expect to be served at Windsor Castle, and instantly, my day brightens.

This happiness is the result of taking a nearsighted view of life as opposed to the kind in which you wake up and begin thinking about the Middle East. I wake up and look at the head on the pillow next to mine and arise and put on my pants and empty my bladder and go for coffee and find marmalade and think of Mr. Strite who, a few years after my mother was born in Minneapolis, perhaps a few miles away from her family’s home on Longfellow Avenue, put a timer in the toaster that sprung a spring and up came bread toasted to a degree you the customer chose, unlike the 1893 pioneer model that tended to burn it.

For years our ancestors became accustomed to eating charred toast in the morning, accepted it along with smallpox and diphtheria and the Ku Klux Klan, and then a smart guy solved the problem. This sort of thing happens on a daily basis. Prior to the toast, I ingest a blood thinner that saved me from the fate of my uncles who died in their late fifties. Also a horse pill that fends off brain seizures such as lead to the inability to form words and other problems even worse. Life without seizures is a beautiful life. You have to have stood, mouth agape, brain blank, people asking, “What’s wrong?” in order to appreciate this.

Some mornings I look at the Times and face up to the cruelty and ignorance and outright evil adrift on this small but beloved planet, and this morning I experience marmalade, Grandpa, my mother four years old encountering Mr. Strite’s pop-up, and then I go for a walk down the street in childlike innocence enjoying the social encounters between dogs and the heroism of manual laborers and the good manners of fellow pedestrians. I descend into the subway and catch the downtown C train because, having grown up in the rural Midwest, train riding is a privilege and pleasure, even if it’s only to 42nd Street, and once there, I pass between the stone lions to ascend to the Rose Reading Room at the library and sit among students, predominantly Asian, and write, or think about writing.

From the marmalade to the long table with green lampshades, I’ve chosen one pleasure after another, and when noon approaches, I have a lunch wagon in mind in Bryant Park, which offers an Italian sausage in a bun. Walking around the park eating a sausage with mustard is my idea of what a real city guy does, a guy with places to go and things to do, so why waste an hour and a half sitting at a table with a tablecloth with three people who are outraged by something in this morning’s paper and eager to share their umbrage, which is sound and fury signifying nothing, whereas my heart is beating, I can form words even if I choose not to, and my Grandpa is with me, a stern old Scotsman incapable of saying “I love you” to a child, but he loved marmalade and so do I and that, my dears, is all I can ask for.

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I don’t listen to the radio or watch TV except for baseball and even then I turn the sound off because the aging mind is so susceptible to irritability and who needs to go around in a state of irk. My favorite medium is the telephone and the comedy routine of talking with old friends. As the body falls apart, people get funnier and funnier. I also like the scraps of phone talk overheard on walks, the woman walking into Walgreens who said, “Jesus, where are you?” and the woman who said, “I know what you said, I’m not deaf.” I cherish these things. “Jesus, where are you?” has become a part of my life.

But on New Year’s Eve, I walked by a party and I heard the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” and days later I rode in an Uber and heard Barry Manilow’s “I Write the Songs” and they’re up in my head, and I can disperse them with a Chopin étude or a Bach chorale, but they come back, and for some reason, so does “I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener,” and this is very irritating when a man is trying to write a novel.

My friend Sally tells me that, since her husband died, she needs to keep a radio on all day and into the night, to keep loneliness at bay. Okay. Fine. I’ve gone into restaurants where recorded music was playing and I turned around and walked out. I went to dinner at friends’ once and they played Judy Collins through the whole meal and it about drove me nuts.

Silence is a basic necessity. I’m an early riser and as I make coffee and take my meds, my dreams evaporate and my waking mind is open to inspiration and sometimes finds it — I suddenly know what’s next in my novel, I think of a letter I need to write to someone, and I don’t want an Oscar Mayer wiener to butt in. The thought of wanting to be one, of wanting to be eaten, a jingle about cannibalism. I’ve been off Oscar Mayer for decades, I eat a Nathan’s now and then but what I crave is the Kramarczuk’s bratwurst from the Kramarczuk’s Sausage Company on East Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis.

A Kramarczuk’s brat, steamed, on a lightly toasted bun with some mayo, chopped onions, and a mighty mustard, is a sausage worth singing about.

When I’m down and hopes are shot,
Give me a Kramarczuk’s brat,
In a bun with mustard, hot,
And suddenly life is not
Near as bad as I had thought,
And I’m grateful for the brat I’ve got.
Just remember the c and z
And life’s as good as it can be.

In my mind I am walking through downtown Minneapolis and across the Hennepin Avenue Bridge, the frozen Mississippi below, the foundations of old flour mills and it’s a bitter cold day and I’m miserable because my life is one failure after another, I was a dorky kid in high school and I developed literary pretensions in order to distinguish myself from others, but it’s all too clear to me that I am a fake and a fraud, and then I smell the sausage factory, and I step into the deli and order a brat and a cup of coffee, and sit down and eat.

Sausage teaches a writer an excellent lesson. A sausage is not made of filet mignon, it is made of various things, some of which you’d rather not know about, but with the proper seasoning, it becomes a masterpiece, and so can writing. Look at this column, which is about silence and it works in Jesus and the telephone and Chopin and a bad jingle and a cold winter day and then a magical bratwurst. I wrote it at one sitting early in the morning and I think it’s the best column I ever wrote. When my beloved wakes up, I’m going to read it to her aloud and her laughter is priceless to me, better than a Chopin étude.

I may put it in my novel. It’s an autobiographical novel about an old writer who looks back on his life and sees all the sloughs of despond and I think a bratwurst can be to me what that madeleine was to Proust. You never know when joy might strike. Enjoy the silence and be alert and you may be amazed what will come to mind.

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I walked into the neighborhood bank the other day and there in the lobby, loading the ATM machines, were two guys with fistfuls of money, bricks of $100s, $50s $20s, a sight I’d never seen before, perhaps a signal from alternative reality that my chance at bank robbery was here, but then I saw the third man, his hand on the pistol in his holster, and so instead I walked up to the cashier’s window and asked for a couple grand so I can make New Year’s gifts to doormen at our building and Mitch the plumber and our cleaning lady and also to some deserving children.

I know it’s pitifully small-minded of me but I enjoy walking around with a $100 bill in my pocket. It’s a token of good luck. A silver dollar used to be a token but luck has undergone inflation. I’m old enough to remember when I picked radishes at Schreiber’s truck farm for a nickel a bunch, I remember it whenever I eat a radish. I was a dishwasher for $1.35/hour and a parking lot attendant for slightly more. In 1969, I sold a small humorous piece of writing to a magazine and got $500 for it and that settled me on a writing career. It wasn’t a matter of talent; it was about money. I chose radio because I could write for it and it paid better than radishes.

I married up, which is a good idea for a man, and when I came home from the bank my wife was very excited about the Webb telescope out in space sending pictures back to earth of celestial bodies millions of light years old, stars in the process of creation, that sort of thing, and it was very uplifting to hear her excitement about this marvel, even though it’s made her dubious about Creationism, which troubles me as an Episcopalian, but she was absolutely breathless with wonder at the advance of science, not realizing she was married to a potential bank robber.

I’m sorry if gay men miss out on the uplifting influence of the superior gender. Men, even in the 21st century, are still corrupted by our centuries as slavers, tyrants, despoilers, mobsters, monsters, and miscreants, whereas women, deprived of the opportunity to do evil, have pursued purity of heart and high standards.

This is true of my beloved and also of my women friends and colleagues. In my performing career, I sing duets with a woman friend, and once, backstage, about to go onstage and sing the Louvin Brothers’ “If I Could Only Win Your Love,” she pointed to my cheek and handed me a hanky and I looked in a mirror and there was some of my supper on my cheek, which I wiped off and we went out and sang.

Some men in the audience, envious of the glamorous company I keep, would’ve loved to see some corn kernels and a smear of meatloaf on my face, but the women only wanted to hear the song, which, forgive me for saying this, makes so much more sense sung by Heather and me than by Ira and Charlie Louvin. Two brothers shouldn’t need to win each other’s love, and most of the brother duets ran into serious problems, Don and Phil, the Wilson Brothers of the Beach Boys, and so on.

Men without women are in trouble and they know it. If Rudy had had a wife in 2020, he wouldn’t have given the press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping with hair dye running down his cheeks and told the big lie about the election, which led him down the slippery slope toward his defeat in court and bankruptcy and who knows what lies ahead. A wife would’ve said, “Wrong Four Seasons, sweetie, and go wash your hair.” If Melania had checked her husband’s speech, she would’ve said, “Skip the part about vermin poisoning our bloodstream. It’s creepy and weird.”

The chunks of hundreds and fifties were within easy reach, but I didn’t yield to impulse, I came home and listened to the woman I live with express wonder at the infinitude of the Creation, and instead of doing ten to twenty for grand larceny, I get to have lunch with her. This is a good way to start the New Year.
No more long shots, stick with what you know to be true, be glad for the Ben Franklin in my pocket. I am prepared to be lucky.

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