Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 19

You never know when happiness will strike or what form it may take but I believe we who come from a strict religious upbringing are at an advantage over you heathens because even slight pleasure makes us dizzy and actual joy blows our minds. A coal miner appreciates a field of tulips more than a florist does. I get a thrill every time my wife of 28 years casually puts her hand on my shoulder in wordless affection. This is due to the fact that I didn’t kiss a girl until I was 22 years old. I was Brethren. I stared, I fantasized, I sat near some girls, but our lips never met. And when they did, I burst into verse.

I get pleasure from words, which is surely due to coming from taciturn people, so when I happen upon a seed catalogue and look through the beans (Scarlet Runner, Provider, Contender, Gold Rush, Blue Lake, Tenderette Green) and the corn (Bodacious, Ambrosia Hybrid, Sugar Buns, Abundance) and the tomatoes (Early Girl, Better Boy, Beefsteak, Sweetie, Big Boy, Sunset’s Red Horizon, Jubilee, Juliet, Moneymaker, Aunt Ruby’s, Boy Oh Boy, Nebraska Wedding, Calypso, Abe Lincoln) it’s a garden of poetry.

Happiness happened to me a few days ago on a cruise aboard the Queen Mary, which was very relaxing, but relaxation makes me uneasy, and I was looking forward to return to New York, and then we got gussied up for New Year’s Eve, my wife in a sparkly gown, I in a tux and red bow tie, and after dinner, around 10:30, proceeded to the grand ballroom where a big band was playing.

The dance floor is the size of a volleyball court, big enough for terrific dance couples to show their stuff, and we sat and observed. Everyone was decked out in their absolute snazziest outfit, and a couple dozen Freds and Gingers were doing long glides and twirls, shaking to the samba and cha-cha, some hot jazz numbers, waltzes, foxtrots — it was a Forties movie come to life — and the outfits were fascinating, gay male couples in sequined jackets, silvery gowns on slender ladies, some Scots in kilts, glitter and gaudiness galore, party hats with feathers, and the crowd grew and grew, hundreds of people in the room and the dance floor got so crowded that we amateurs could step in, the traffic jam making no fancy dancing possible, we were just a mob swaying, and as the music got hotter, the crowd got crazier, a big mosh pit, and the band played “Dancing in the Street” as young women leaped around, then “Y.M.C.A.” with arms in the air, it was thrilling being in a mass of swaying throbbing humanity.

Hundreds of mature people in a state of delight and I felt that I, the tall somber man brought up to believe that dancing is sinful, was the most delirious person on the floor. My sweetie, who an hour before had said not to ask her to dance, was dancing. We were beside ourselves. All the dire thoughts about 2024, climate change, wars and war crimes, the future of democracy, were momentarily forgotten. I imagined the same thing happened on December 31, 1941, and I’ll bet my mother-in-law Orrell, a passionate dancer, was at a Manhattan ballroom that night, having a big time.

The band kicked “It’s All Right” and we shouted the chorus and then “You Can’t Hurry Love” as the clock ticked down, and “I Saw Her Standing There” with everyone singing the falsetto notes. Elderly CEO-types, distinguished matrons, responsible liberals, all suddenly adolescent with so much joy as the band played the perfect song — You are the dancing queen, young and sweet, only seventeen, feel the beat from the tambourine — and we counted to midnight, and I kissed my beloved, and we sang “Auld Lang Syne” and there it was. A thousand dignified Yanks and Brits transfigured briefly into playful children while sailing the Atlantic. A glorious feeling. Nothing is changed really except that we discover that we have the capacity for giddy pleasure in a mob of people who feel exactly the same.

There are troubles ahead and sadness and confusion but what I wish for you in the New Year are moments of wild leaping happiness like that night. If tomatoes can be jubilant and sweet corn bodacious, then so can we be. Let’s do it for each other, Sugar Buns.

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We took a cruise ship out of New York to the Caribbean over the holidays, which was a good education. Twelve days among elderly people tells you what sort of elder you wish to be when you get there — mobile, standing up straight, cheerful, and conversing intelligently with others, not just to yourself. These elderly folks were carelessly frittering away their children’s inheritance, money that might’ve put a young person through Malarkey State for a degree in communications and a career as an influencer, but it was sweet to see the affection between the lengthily married, the exchange of glances, holding hands, the impulsive kiss. To stay in love, that’s a good way to maintain compos mentis.

Let the kids deal with AI, let’s U and I perch on the stern deck and watch the sun rise over Barbados and I’ll talk about my Yorkshire ancestors back in the 18th century and what if they’d immigrated here and started a plantation and enslaved the locals to cut the cane while the Keillors lounged on the veranda sipping rum and reading Jane Austen, but of course they were northern stoics like me and pleasure made them feel queasy so they wound up in Minnesota and got into dairying, no slaves available except your own children.

I recall what I learned in 10th grade History, that we might be speaking French today except for the Court of Versailles losing favor among the bourgeoisie who had no interest in fighting the Brits and hanging onto the American colonies, which were mainly valuable for fur — no, the French looked south to the Caribbean to find a plentiful source of sugar. Mink is for the few, malted milkshakes and Milky Ways are for the many. Had the North Dakota sugar beet industry been in existence in 1750, the French would’ve held on and we Minnesotans would be connoisseurs of savoir faire and I could refer to my body of work as my oeuvre. We’d look down on the Dutch of New York, the Brits having followed the tea clippers to Canton, and not the one in Ohio. Thus appetite and personal preference shape history.

The real education, however, is to discover how sweet Christmas is when you get away from the songs about the joy of riding in a one-horse open sleigh and the chestnuts roasting on an open fire and recover the true meaning of the day, which is coziness and contentment with those you’re close to: standing at a ship’s rail at night and looking up at Orion with your wife and daughter has more to do with Christmas than sleighs or chestnuts or even boughs of holly.

On Christmas Eve, the waiter brought us complimentary glasses of sparkling wine and I took a sip of mine, the first alcohol other than Communion wine I’ve tasted in twenty years. It was a slender flute glass and I took a swallow and nothing happened, no memories of wild youth, just a quiet message from my brain: Proceed with caution. The slight rocking of the ship was enough inebriation, I didn’t need to get into the sauce. I used to know some hefty drinkers back in college and I enjoyed their company and they’re all gone now. It feels creepy to be around drunks. I once enjoyed an occasional cigar and now the smokers are gone except for a few standing outside the front doors of cafes. I used to hang out with guys who smoked and drank and told jokes and now they’re gone and I walk around with a great joke in my head and nobody to tell it to.

A priest sees that his bicycle is missing so he preaches on the text, Thou shalt not steal and then sees the verse Thou shalt not commit adultery and now he remembers where he left his bicycle. I love this joke but the guys who’d appreciate it are gone.

I’m on a ship sitting on a deck chair, my hand on my beloved’s leg, and I think of the priest who says to the rabbi, “I know you’re Orthodox but have you ever tasted pork?” The rabbi says, “Yes, a couple of times, and I know you’re supposed to be celibate, and have you—-?” The priest says, “Yes, a couple of times.” And the rabbi says, “Better than pork, isn’t it?” Happy 2024. I wish you all the bacon you desire and no more celibacy than necessary.

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Old Man Christmas (moi) has been out shopping and found a shop that sells hiking shoes so, being married to a hiker, I went in and saw beautiful alligator boots, also a pair of sharkskin, and wouldn’t this be perfect for my beloved venturing into ungenteel neighborhoods, boots made from man-eating creatures, better than pepper spray or a Smith & Wesson, but the pricetag was staggering –– I’m the son of a postal clerk –– so I moved on. I went to Macy’s on 34thStreet just to ride the wooden escalator and hear it clunking and I roamed past perfume counters but was distracted by the stunning beauties behind the counters, women who’d come to the city to become fashion models but were only 5”11” and were overweight at 117 lbs. and so were relegated to retail sales and now at 22 they’re over the hill.

It made me sad, the abandoned dreams –– you see it everywhere –– and I left the store and went to the public library on 42nd and sat in the Rose Reading Room and came back to my senses. My beloved and I have merged two. Domiciles into one and we are still in a deaccessionizing process and don’t need a pile of gifts under a tree. I’ll put some cash in envelopes for our building’s doormen and super and send some to little kids I know and a $100 bill to a few friends so they can buy a good bottle of champagne, not a chintzy one.

I did a show in New York a couple weeks ago and at the end I had the audience sing “Silent Night,” the verse about calmness and brightness and also the shepherds and heavenly hosts and then we hummed a verse which, a capella, was so tender and haunting and beautiful, I saw people dabbing at their eyes, but at the same time I knew I was out on a limb, it being New York, there being so many unbelievers in the crowd and –– Hello? It’s New York? The handclapping to “Chanukah O Chanukah” an hour before told you that the Bernsteins and Brusteins and Blooms were in the house, and had they paid $109.50, to attend a Lutheran service? I don’t think so but I’m not going to speak for them.

They all knew the words: this came through clearly. Maybe they were Orthodox Chasidim from Crown Heights but they knew “Silent Night” and you can call it colonial acculturation but it sounded authentic to me and my purpose was only to give them the pleasure of joining a 1500-voice choir, a rare privilege in our fragmented society, wary people edging away from each other, and shouldn’t each of us at least once a year consider the possibility that the Creator of the Universe of galaxies known and unknown billions of light years away should come to this tiny insignificant planet in the form of an infant in order to better understand us mortal beings? It’s beyond our understanding but then so is the Universe.

In return, I will consider that maybe the Chasidim are right and I have wasted a great deal of time listening to sermons on the Pauline epistles.

I do believe in the Christmas story, that God put his omnipotence on a shelf and became an infant child –– it’s in keeping with Christ telling his disciples, “What you do for the least of these, ye do for me.” I believe, except for the three wise guys. How they snuck in is a mystery. Gold, frankincense, and myrrh are not suitable gifts for a newborn. Three wise women would’ve brought something useful and arrived in time to help deliver the infant, make supper, and clean the stable.

The Christian faith has given us plenty of Jerks and they’ve been running rampant recently, bands of Visigoths lying about our democratic institutions, trying to pillage, and I consider the quiet communal “Silent Night” some compensation for the trouble they’ve caused. My daughter was born a few days after Christmas 26 years ago and I’ll always remember the calmness and brightness of that December. I have been a quaking shepherd ever since. All I can tell you is “Hark.” If you’ve neglected harking, it’s never too late to resume. Look around. Listen. There are no flashing amber lights at shepherd crossings and the FAA tracks aviation, not angelic beings. Forget the snowman and the reindeer. Santa is preposterous. The Cratchits are sort of creepy. But there are radiant beams if you look for them.

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I walked down Columbus Avenue the other day and passed a young woman talking on the phone just as she said, loud and clear, “There is a reason for everything,” and it sticks with me, rationalism proclaimed publicly. I wish I’d stopped and asked her for some context; she seemed to be one of those bold women you could engage in a colloquy, unlike other women who shrink at a “Good morning” as you hold the elevator door for them. New York women tend to be bold, Minnesota women faint of heart and a man would do well to avoid eye contact, although in situations of mutual suffering — e.g., the long line at airport security at 6 a.m. — some sweet conversations with strangers do occur.

I lead a small life and think small thoughts. I read a long essay by a former colleague explaining how comedy works and was awestruck. I study the workings of a coffeemaker. I take my meds from a handy container with two little compartments for each day, one for morning, one for evening. Someone thought of this. An older person on a regimen of pills. Perhaps a postal clerk like my dad, who sorted mail into racks of little boxes, and what if he had invented the Med-O-Rack? We’d maybe have moved from north Minneapolis to a horse farm called Meadowcroft and I’d have competed in equestrian events instead of reading novels by flashlight and gained great confidence to go into venture capitalism and become a king of crypto and wind up doing time for fraud.

I sit and eat my breakfast waffles, the kind that come frozen in a box and you toast them in a toaster, a great invention, not as great as the drug Levetiracetam, which has guarded me against brain seizures that might’ve left me unable to figure out how to put the waffles into the toaster slots, but nonetheless an advance for those of us who are counting our blessings. Other columnists deal with the national debt, the threat of autocracy, man’s inhumanity to man, and I eat my waffle and remember what we did before this modern wonder came along.

In my parents’ home, waffles took time so they were saved for Saturday morning; you had to locate our waffle iron, a big clunky appliance kept on a high shelf in the laundry room, and we washed the griddle while someone else mixed the batter, and we put Mazola oil or margarine on it for a lubricant, and someone said, “Not too much,” so not enough was put on, so as the waffle baked, it stuck to the griddle, and we had to pry it loose with a fork and it tore into chunks and slivers, which we slathered with syrup and ate, though they were doughy inside, and from this, we got a feeling that life would turn out to be a disappointment. This waffle I’m eating this morning is crisply baked and the syrup is genuine maple from Vermont, not merely maple-flavored, and the waffle is a seven-grain, which is surely a good thing.

I eat my breakfast and my beloved appears, cellphone in hand, and plays back to me the audio recording of me snoring last night. It’s an aspect of myself I’ve never previously encountered, a primal quality, growling, like a mature cougar guarding his cubs, claiming his territory, warning predators. She thinks it’s funny, and I suppose it is, but there is a ferocity there too.

I put my dishes in the dishwasher and walk twenty feet to my desk and she follows and shows me a new photograph of the great-nephew in Connecticut. Almost four months old and he is quite focused on the camera, just as I was on my waffle. He seems to be on the verge of speech. The world moves ahead. Public interest in Taylor Swift has waned somewhat. Finally, after reading a thousand times the phrase “X, formerly known as Twitter,” we now see it referred to simply as X, no footnote. We bury the dead and life goes on. The woman on the street was talking to a friend who’d suffered an unexpected setback like my father’s failure to invent the little medicine chest and I want to grab that phone and say, “Trust me, this is going to come out well in the end. It looks bad now but tomorrow is a new day and the story has yet to be written. Press on.”

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I love Christmas, coming as I do from fundamentalists, a bunch who don’t score high on the Festivity Scale. My mother hugged me only once, to keep me from falling out of a moving vehicle. I don’t recall my father ever telling a joke. So Christmas was a brief episode of flamboyant frivolity in an otherwise solemn life in which we looked forward to End Times and our flight up out of Minnesota into paradise, just us, not the Catholics.

This year my little family is taking a vacation from the holiday and on December 25 we’ll be on a ship out on the Atlantic. It’s our gift to us. No tree with a pile of gifts under it. We’ve done that and we need a reset. I used to roam through little shops buying Slovakian soufflé pans or Peruvian porcelain trivets and presenting them to folks who were not trivet-type people and whose annual soufflé output was approximately zero so the gifts wound up in storage, and when the recipients went off to Happydale, teenagers snapped up the soufflé pans for 15¢ and used them to heat up frozen pizzas and the trivets wound up as doorstops.

I don’t do heroic Christmases anymore. One year I made a bouillabaisse with a saffron I sent away to Bangkok for and I made the broth by boiling swordfish carcasses and there were chubs and grubs and sprats tied up in cheesecloth and mulled millet and I culled the fat with a glass refractor and reduced it in a chafing dish and it took four days to make and I set it in front of people and they took a spoonful and said, “Oh. Nice.” I gave that up, too.

I’m an old man. I’m in the deacquisitioning stage of life. No more gifts, please. One candle, one gingerbread cookie, fried Spam with canned turkey gravy and tater tots and a Fudgsicle. Done.

Christmas at sea with my wife and daughter is a beautiful idea. One hopes for calm seas and not thirty-foot waves that leave us kneeling at plumbing fixtures, one hopes for quiet places where one is safe from the jingling and fa-la-laing, where we can simply recall Christmases past.

I have two in mind. One was in 1997 when my wife was four days away from delivering a tiny infant girl and the two of us sat in a New York apartment in quiet anticipation of this marvelous gift. No need for anything else, it was Christmas in its purest form, awaiting a new life. And the other was when I was 13 and my father was in the hospital with a fractured skull, having fallen off a barn while reroofing it. My mother warned us that Dad had been off work for months, recuperation was complicated, so we six children should not expect our usual fancy Christmas.

I was okay with that. I didn’t crave stuff, I didn’t care about clothes, I was a reader, a borrower of library books. But one Sunday at church, I noticed a box in the cloakroom marked “For the Keillor family at Christmas,” and I shrank in horror at being a charity case. I felt offended. Charity was for starving children in Africa, for the bums at the gospel mission, for cripples and the deranged and old people. Not for us.

I think it made me ungracious about accepting generosity. I became a habitual grabber of the check at lunches. I felt embarrassed when complimented. I am not a good guest. I am still trying to correct this defect.

So our little trio is going to sea and my New Year’s resolution, as the ship heads back to New York, is to be grateful for life itself and love and friendship. I was lucky to have a life as a writer and drift through the outskirts of the arts, music especially, and when you hang with musicians, you never lack for friendship. They are an aristocracy well acquainted with poverty and so they learn to graciously accept help when needed and offer it when possible. I married a musician, which let me into this charmed circle. When we sail away on the ship, a musician and her child — who were in need of a place to stay — will come stay in our apartment. We offered, she graciously accepted. Grace is my goal, grace and gratitude. Grace is my daughter’s middle name and I intend to make it mine.

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The ice hasn’t yet frozen solid on the lakes of Minnesota due to a warm November and the ice-fishing shacks are waiting to be towed out on the ice so men can sit in them and pretend to fish. Their real purpose is to get away from women so they can speak frankly and express improprieties that, on shore, would get them citations from the Woke P.D.

Women don’t go ice-fishing because where would they pee? Men do it on the ice, just as fish pee in the lake and deer in the underbrush. Women scorn this sort of behavior (“Where were you brought up? In a barn?”) and women’s scorn is powerful, a man shrinks in the face of it. Even I do. I feel small just mentioning it.

I’ve told jokes that made men laugh heartily and women sniff and roll their eyes. (“Taylor Swift leads her family on a tour of the stables at her mansion when suddenly a thoroughbred lets a tremendous fart. She says, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. A thousand pardons,’ and her uncle says, ‘That’s all right. As a matter of fact, I thought it was the horse.’”) The women groan and look away and I switch to a different subject, urban zoning, diversity, the Book of Ezekiel.

Men need a space of our own, a garage, a shop in the basement, a shack on a frozen lake, some place where no woman will walk in and say, “How can you stand to sit here in the midst of all this stuff?” We can stand it because we are free spirits, we don’t obsess about straight lines and alphabetical order.

(I used to sit around with men in a saloon but I quit ages ago because the talk was about sports and I think football is inhumane and basketball meaningless and who needs to hang around with people fascinated by meaninglessness and in the end I quit drinking, which made me appreciate baseball and hockey more.)

My space is a desk at the far end of the DR. No walls around the desk but I’ve made it as shacky as I can and due to my poor peripheral vision it feels private but when my beloved walks through the DR on her way from the K to the LR, I can hear her eyes roll. She thinks, “How can he accomplish anything sitting in the midst of heaps of papers?” But I don’t feel that writing needs to accomplish anything, it’s a basic function like seeing or hearing.

I’m a northern person, I need winter. Adversity makes me cheerful, ease and pleasure make me uneasy. Winter keeps me indoors, which is where most good writing occurs. And proximity to chaos stimulates production of sentences that read from left to right, like this one.

Young men are different. They were brought up by feminist mothers and learned to live on women’s terms and speak sensitively and maintain the appearance of neatness. They don’t require personal space, they are socialized and merge well with others. I’m from an earlier era when we worshipped women as angels and goddesses, our superiors in all the ways that matter, and why superiors would settle for equality was beyond me. Why would a smart woman like Hillary want to be president and live in the swamp with the porcupines? So we elected a goofball doofus who would provide us steady amusement. He has been wildly outrageous longer than Joey Ramone or Johnny Rotten or the Sex Pistols. He has given most of the country the luxury of despising him, a great privilege in a democracy, to look down on the powerful.

He has done this by doing guy talk in public that formerly was limited to the barroom or the fishing shack. He stands in front of big crowds, as the press watches in amazement, and he talks just like your old uncle Sid who was the embarrassment of the family, and people eat it up, buckets of it.

I went ice-fishing a few times with a friend’s uncle and his pals and the friend and I didn’t say a word as the old guys ripped into the government, schools, the young, the newspapers, doctors, lawyers, wives, authorities of all sorts. It was freedom of speech on hallucinogens. Nobody caught a fish and it didn’t matter. It was impressive. I never went back. Now I don’t need to, I just listen to Whatsisname.

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Two days ago, a profound experience. I found a set of transcripts someone had made of monologues I did years ago on the radio and I read one. Someone had written down word for word what I said and when the audience laughed, they put in the word LAUGHTER. And guess what? I read through it and it wasn’t funny. LAUGHTER. Not even slightly. LAUGHTER. I had said it and back in 1982 a theaterful of people had loved it and in 2023 it was about as funny as a pile of bricks. LAUGHTER. Have you, dear reader, ever gone back to your distinguished past and been depantsed the way I was? LAUGHTER. No, you have not. I wanted to jump out a window. LAUGHTER. Fortunately, the windows in our apartment are childproofed and I can’t open them. LAUGHTER. And also it’s New York and I could hear children’s voices from the street and I don’t want my suicide to accidentally wipe out a bunch of eight-year-olds leashed together on their way to the Museum of Natural History. LAUGHTER. That’s not funny, by the way. LAUGHTER.

So I’m in the wrong line of work. I’ve wasted my life. I earned a good living at it and it was fun while it lasted but it contributed nothing of value to the world and I’d have been better off sticking with my first job, which was dishwashing. I was good at it. I ran racks of dishes through big industrial dishwashers and they came out steaming clean and I scrubbed the pots and pans by hand and I didn’t come back forty years later to learn that the cafeteria had been shut down by the health department on account of dirty dishes.

I notice that you’re not laughing anymore.

But my new guiding principle is “Don’t look back in anger or look forward in fear but look around you in awareness.” (James Thurber) I don’t look back at my decades of bad jokes; I look around and I see my wife walk in with a grocery bag and hand me a 60-ounce filet mignon, in violation of her own principles that eating beef is unhealthy and that cattle ranching is an ecological disaster. Love triumphs over principle.

I do the same for her when I go with her to hear a Brahms symphony. She’ll reciprocate next summer and come with me to see the Rolling Stones. I think of my father who, as a devout Christian, believed that Christmas was unscriptural, a sacrilege, the exploitation of the gospel for commercial gain, but for the sake of my mother, who adored Christmas, the gaudy tree and enormous stockings hung by the fireplace and beautifully wrapped gifts and the feast itself, swallowed principle and went along with the game.

“Since feeling is first, whoever pays attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you,” said E.E. Cummings. In other words, don’t fall in love with a copy editor.

I have friends who’re planning to visit distant relatives for Christmas and they know it’ll mean three nights on a rollaway in a basement and their kids on an inflatable mattress nearby and when they need to pee at 3 a.m. it’ll be a treacherous journey up two flights and past an unfamiliar dog. These relatives are country people who rise early and drink instant coffee, not the exotic beans from the volcanic slopes of Guatemala with their notes of cocoa and cucumber, and instant oatmeal, not the steel-cut Irish oatmeal, and with whom one must at all costs avoid politics lest the conversation sink into the swamp of conspiracy theories, but nonetheless my friends are going to hit the road and do the deed in the spirit of Christmas.

Thanks to my mother, I awoke at 4 a.m. and came downstairs to find my stocking stuffed, the big orange in the toe. The cup of tea I’d left for Santa was empty, my note to him was gone. The chimney was only a pipe, and yet in a corner of my heart, I felt that, even with all the millions of children in the world, the old saint had remembered me.

I still feel loved. I tried to feel abandoned so I could be an important poet but it didn’t work. LAUGHTER. The woman puts a hand on my shoulder. My daughter sits beside me. Christmas is coming. All I need is an orange, a lit candle, and I’ll put a record on the turntable and hear the Rolling Stones sing “O Come All Ye Faithful.” From their very rare “Stoned Noel” album released only in Guatemala.

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My life has gotten very small and I’m not happy about that. I used to know some farmers and got to hear them talk about their lives and now I don’t know any. I have very few friends who live in small towns. I know plenty of writers, lawyers, teachers, performers, and nobody who earns a living as a carpenter, plumber, or electrician. And so far as I know, none of my friends are Republicans. I used to have some but they died or became independents. I miss their points of view.

This struck home when I read about Sandra Day O’Connor who died earlier this month. I listened to an interview she gave the Times in 2008 on condition it be released only after her death. It’s a memento of Republicanism as it once was and which the country needs now, a party of civility and pragmatism and patriotism.

She grew up on a primitive Arizona ranch far from town, loved the life, went away to Stanford and found her vocation in the law when the idea of women lawyers was rather novel. She worked on the law review with a classmate, married him, had three children, practiced law on the side, got into Republican politics, became a judge, and in 1981 President Reagan appointed her to the Supreme Court, the first woman justice. He’d promised to appoint a woman during the 1980 campaign, which helped him beat Jimmy Carter.

It’s wonderful hearing her at age 78 talking cheerfully about her life. As a young woman, she was hired by the Arizona attorney general, who assigned her to work at the state mental hospital. “To do what?” she said. “Whatever they need,” he said. So she went about organizing a legal aid clinic for the mentally ill, a simple necessary good. Big law firms weren’t hiring women lawyers for fear of what clients might think, so she started her own. As Chief Justice Roberts said, “She broke down barriers for women in the legal profession to the betterment of that profession and the country as a whole.” She was a mid-level state judge when Reagan appointed her — she thought he liked the fact that she’d grown up on a ranch — and off to Washington she went. She was a conservative but a pragmatist at heart, a problem-solver, and as the Court shifted ideologically, she held her ground and cast deciding votes on some historic cases. As you hear her talk about her life and work, you note that there is no resentment, no anger. Bombasticity, not a trace.

The reporter asks how she felt when decisions were overturned for which she’d written the majority opinion and she says, “Well, how would you feel?” That’s as angry as she gets. I had Republican aunts like her; I miss them.

When her husband was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she took care of him. “In the early days of my husband’s illness, I often took him to court with me because he could not be left alone.” She stepped down from the Court to care for him as his condition deteriorated. He wound up in a care center, deep into Alzheimer’s, and there, forgetting he had a wife, he fell in love with another woman, and Justice O’Connor visited the two of them, holding hands, in love, he no longer recognizing her, and she was glad to see him happy. This is pragmatism of a very high order.

I read fundraising mail from progressives about empowering all voices from diverse backgrounds and identities to create spaces of healing and inspire a sense of authentic belonging in our journey toward equity, diversity, and inclusivity, eliminating oppression and developing effective tools for social justice, and O My God do I miss hearing farmers talk about the weather, my aunts talking about my grandfather driving a team of horses pulling a cultivator, holding the reins in one hand and a book in the other.

I’m in love with a pragmatic woman, thank goodness, who snorts aloud at “create spaces of healing” and “effective tools for social justice,” but who feels at home in a hardware store and can deal with bureaucracy on the phone. I attend a church with two women rectors, I go to a woman dentist and a woman neurologist. I have a niece aiming to be an architect, friends’ daughters and granddaughters taking their places in law and medicine and academia, most of them leaning leftward but nonetheless they owe a debt to plainspoken Republicans like Justice O’Connor. We are poorer without her.

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So the news is out. Harvard will be offering a course on Taylor Swift in the spring. The professor, who is 52, is a Swift fan and describes her interest in Swift — “she’s someone who worked to become herself and makes her own decisions in a way that brings people along with her and doesn’t alienate people.” I suppose you could say the same about Shakespeare, though he did alienate some people who then wound up in engineering or medicine.

In the course, Swift’s work will be compared to other writers such as Coleridge and Wordsworth. “Wordsworth also writes about some of the same feelings that Taylor sings about: disappointment in retrospect, and looking back and realizing that you’re not the child you were, even though you might want to be.” Students will write three term papers but there may not be a final exam. “I have such mixed feelings about final exams because they stress people out. They’re a pain to give and they’re no fun.”

The professor came across Swift about 12 years ago. “I noticed that of all of the songs that one would hear in, you know, drugstores and airports and bus stations and public places, there was one that was better than all the other songs. I wanted to know who wrote it. It was just a more compelling song lyrically and musically, just a perfect piece of construction. It was ‘You Belong With Me.’”

That’s the song whose chorus goes:
“If you could see that I’m the one who understands you,
Been here all along, so why can’t you see?
You belong with me, you belong with me.”

Some people may prefer “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove. O no! it is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken; it is the star to every wand’ring bark, whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken,” and other people prefer “Why can’t you see you belong with me.”

Oh well. I was an English major back in the Classics Era, but I don’t care if English professors teach pop songs or the backs of cereal boxes and produce Artificial Intellectuals with a doctorate in self-realization. I am minding my own business. As James Thurber said, “Let us not look back in anger or look forward in fear but let us look around us in awareness.” It’s plain old sensible Midwestern stoicism and they should put it on the dollar bill in place of “In God we trust.” The progressive left looks back in anger and the regressive right looks forward in fear, but the old man walks down the street and is aware of bustling enterprise, delivery e-bikes, little storefronts striving to survive, tight clusters of families, the woman in full stride announcing into her iPhone, “That’s absolutely ridiculous,” the man and woman stopping because their dogs wish to talk to each other.

I live in New York City because my wife likes it here, which is the best reason: to live with a happy woman. I like it too. I walk down the street and every so often someone grins at me and says, “Hey, I’m from Minnesota.” People didn’t do that back in Minnesota all those years I lived there. We shake hands and I ask, “Where you from?” and “What do you get to do there?” and from Hometown and Occupation, we formulate a conversation. I’ve met people that way whom, back in Minnesota, I’d never have gotten to talk to, a chemical engineer, a pediatric dentist, some retired cops, a couple writers, and a retired special ed teacher who’d listened to me on the radio since we were each in our twenties.

It was a sweet, unexpected encounter. She said she missed listening to me; she wept as she said it. I put an arm around her. Now I wish I’d said:

       For true wisdom and authentic feeling

       Don’t listen to songs that come out of a ceiling.

       “No wise man ever longed to be younger.”

       If for self-knowledge, you hunger,

       Postpone success and learn from failure.

       You belong with Jonathan Swift, not Taylor.

       He said, “Every dog will have its day.”

       And so she does and hip hip hooray,

       But put away anger, put away fear,

       Sweetheart, you belong with Shakespeare.

       Your sweet love is such a gift,

       I would scorn to trade places with Miss Swift.

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