Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 20

The Communion hymn in church last Sunday was “All People That on Earth Do Dwell,” which I cherish for the lines “Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice:
serve him with mirth,” which is the only time comedy is mentioned in our hymnal, I do believe. There’s joy and rejoicing and gladness, but the thought of serving our Creator with jokes is rather rare and, I think, beautiful. I’m not sure I know exactly what joy is but I do know the one about the engineer who sees another engineer rolling a little pellet between his fingers and saying, “I’m trying to figure out if this is more rubbery or more like plastic,” and the first engineer takes the pellet from him and says, “There is plasticity to it but there’s a viscosity, a sort of liquidity too” and he puts it in his mouth and says, “And there’s a salinity to it as well. Where did you get it?” The other engineer says, “Out of my nose.”

A joke is a friendly transaction between two persons and even if it falls flat, it conveys a generous spirit. I have four friends who still tell me jokes, three men, one woman, all of them old enough to remember the Helen Keller jokes (How did Helen Keller burn her fingers? She tried to read the waffle iron.) and the lightbulb jokes (How many philosophers does it take to change a lightbulb? Define “light.”) or the “What’s the difference” jokes (What’s the difference between roast beef and pea soup? Anyone can roast beef.) and the “What did the blank say to the blank” (What did the maxi-pad say to the fart? You are the wind beneath my wings.) and double-amputee jokes (“What do you call a man with no arms or legs hanging on your wall?” Art.) and old guy jokes (Old lawyers never die, they just lose their appeal. Old actuaries never die, they just get broken down by age and sex.) and the Ole and Lena jokes (So Ole died and Lena called up the undertaker to come get him, and he said, “I’ll be there in an hour,” and she said, “I’m having my hair done in half an hour, how about I drag him out to the curb and you can pick him up there?”). And there were Viagra jokes but they petered out.

Back when I hung out in saloon, in a booth stuffed with guys drinking whiskey, all of us in our twenties, trying to get an angle on our lives, any one of us could change the music by saying, “Twelve years in analysis and finally yesterday I got in touch with my emotions and I broke down and cried.”

“What happened?”

“My analyst looked at me and said, ‘No hablo ingles.’”

It was Minneapolis, some of us were grad students, I was a radio DJ, there were a couple of Army vets, we were a tight bunch squeezed in the booth, ambitious, reasonably serious, but there was a patter of jokes to remind us — life is good, don’t take your troubles too seriously — and I miss that tightness. It was a booth for six and we were eight or nine because we really wanted to be there.

So what happened to joke-telling?

For one thing, some of the best jokes are about death. The old Republican is dying and tells his wife, “I’m going to switch parties because I’d rather it happen to a Democrat than to one of us.” These are maybe less funny when you get to be my age. For another thing, a politician came along in 2015 who isn’t funny. This was a first. There were dozens of George Bush jokes and Bill Clinton jokes but with this guy, late-night comics deliver very clever insults but nobody laughs.

I’m not giving up. I was on the phone with a pal who’s in chemo and we spent 58 minutes telling jokes back and forth, including the one about the priest asking the widow, “Did your husband have any last request?” and she said, “Yes, he asked me to put down the gun.” The pal laughed so hard she almost split a seam. Later she called me back to tell me one more. Herschel was swept out to sea by a tidal wave and Mama cried out, “God, you can’t do that to my boy! Bring him back!” and another wave washes Herschel back and Mama cries, “Thank you, God” and then looks at Herschel and looks up at the sky — “He was wearing a hat!” I’ve heard that joke many times and I’m starting to get it. A guy needs a hat.

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The world’s longest parking lot is Fifth Avenue in New York at midday and a week ago I found myself stuck in it, in a cab driven by a devout Sikh with headscarf and big beard, whose religion evidently taught him to Yield, so we moved at a glacial rate from 86th to 43rd Street where I had an important lunch appointment. Had I taken the B train I would’ve been there in a few minutes but that mistake had been made and now I watched pedestrians on the sidewalk passing us.

So what can you do? No need to get fussed up. You embrace stoicism. Epictetus said the way to happiness is to not worry about things beyond your power to control, which includes this taxi ride, totalitarianism, the cost of tickets to “Tannhäuser,” and other things that begin with T. So the two VIPs I am meeting for lunch may have to cool their jets for a while. I don’t have their cellphone numbers — they’re very I — so they’ll just have to amuse themselves at the restaurant. This is New York, a city teeming with amusement, you can stand on any corner and it will come walking along.

I relaxed in the backseat as we inched through the 70s and I remembered the day — I think it was in 1971 — when I flew to New York from Minnesota and got a room at a fleabag hotel, the Seymour, on 44th, which I chose, thinking of Seymour Glass in J.D. Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey,” a book I loved lavishly in college, and the next day I walked around the block to 25 West 43rd Street and took the elevator up to the 17th floor to the office of Roger Angell, a fiction editor at The New Yorker who had bought some stories of mine, the dream of every college writer in America at the time. Back then, I was living in a rented farmhouse near Freeport, Minnesota, just one more impoverished 27-year-old, and I spent the money he sent me for the stories on a flight to New York, where, after telling me how much he liked my stuff, he took me across the street to the Algonquin Hotel for lunch. I felt like the King of the Hill. I think it was one of the most magnificent days of my life, that and the day a nurse handed me my tiny naked daughter in 1997 and my 80th birthday last year when she, my wife Jenny, and I ate breakfast on the porch of a little summer house in Connecticut.

To me, this impromptu recollection of magnificence, while sitting in a guru-driven taxi going 3 mph in Manhattan, is the very embodiment of happiness. I’m a Midwesterner and we’re brought up to recollect our transgressions and wrong turns and here I was, having stupidly chosen taxi over subway, coming late to an important appointment, and that day in 1971 came back, crossing 43rd with a great editor to lunch where he told me that a New Yorker “first reader” named Mary D. Kierstead had pulled my stories off the ”slush pile,” the stack of unsolicited fiction, and sent it upstairs to him. Had she not done that, I imagine I might be an old cabdriver myself these days, or maybe a short-order cook, or a parking lot attendant, but instead my dream of writerdom came true, thanks to an angel named Mary and Roger Angell.

“So what happened when you finally got to the lunch?” you’re wondering. I was somewhat late, they were understanding, I made my pitch, they listened, we had a nice lunch, crab cakes and soup for me, and I could sense that around the room other pitches were being made and you could tell who was who — the pitcher was leaning forward, the pitchee was leaning back. My pitch was caught and they agreed to think about it and we shook hands and parted.

It was about a book project, of course, and at the age of 81, the outcome is not so crucial as Mary Kierstead’s rescue of my stories fifty years ago. I believe in the book I pitched, I really and truly do believe the world needs this book, especially with a liar and crook headed for the White House: this makes beauty all the more important.

But the high point of the day was the cab ride in the parking lot, being late due to my own blunder, and being at peace with it, and remembering the beauty of 1971. Thank you, Ms. Kierstead, wherever you may be.

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I went to see “La Bohème” the other day, such a great opera, it doesn’t matter that the singers aren’t, and let me just say this — at the beginning of the first and last acts, set in the garret, you’ve got Rodolfo and Marcello and the guys and there’s no story, no purpose, nothing but vague bohemianism until Mimi shows up and then the lights come on, and it’s like that in life too. My opinion, okay? Message plays that preach justice and equality are okay for college sophomores but the real story is about two opposites who fall in love and she’s charming and he’s jealous and they come crosswise and hurt each other deeply but in the end they’re tied to each other. Lovers are real, families are real. Demonstrators, not so much.

These days we’re in the era of the Personal Position Statement as we saw in the recent National Book Awards ceremony in New York. There is no NBA for humor because the event is all about Taking Ourselves Very Seriously As Compensation For Slights We Have Suffered From The Uncomprehending World. The winner of the poetry prize, a man from Guam, accepted it on behalf of the poets of the Pacific islands. The translation award was accepted on behalf of gay men, the nonfiction award on behalf of indigenous peoples. If I’d been given the NBA for Brief Amusing Essays, I would’ve needed to accept it on behalf of recovering fundamentalists or overlooked Midwesterners or the marginalized octogenarian and nothing would be said about literary quality.

It was not always thus. I remember loving Theodore Roethke’s work, not as vindication of the humanity of bipolar persons, and James Wright’s, not as honoring the personhood of Ohioans, but because their poems were memorable, stuck with me, were beautiful to my ear, and still are, fifty years later.

One prizewinner said: “Being here tonight as a gay man, receiving this award for a novel about another gay man’s journey to self-acceptance, I wanted to say to everyone who ever felt wrong about themselves that your heart and your desire are true, and you are just as deserving as anybody else of having a fulfilling life.” There is something clunky about “journey to self-acceptance” — I can’t imagine anyone, gay or straight or counterclockwise, saying it in conversation with someone whose company they enjoy, and the idea that feeling wrong about yourself entitles you to a fulfilling life — it leaves out factors such as talent, hard work, good luck, self-discipline. I truly believe that the Deranged Golfer in one tiny corner of his soul feels wrong about himself — how could he not? — but that doesn’t qualify him for the Oval Office.

The NBA ceremony took place in New York, which is the Sarcasm Capital of America: nobody would dare talk aloud about their journey to self-acceptance on the subway or in Zabar’s Deli — you’d get eye-rolling and mocking comments on all sides. Look at the recent resignation of Anne Boyer as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine in protest of the newspaper’s “war-mongering lies” and Israel’s “US-backed war against the people of Gaza” as a war for the benefit of “oil interests and weapon manufacturers.”

This being New York, the real fun was in the Comments section. A few praised her courage and then someone ripped her for “atrocious writing for a college freshman, let alone a Times writer,” and R.T. Castleberry wrote: “That should do it. No doubt there will be peace talks now that the poetry editor of the NY Times Magazine has put her foot down.” Someone wrote, “What does her job have to do with the international tragedy? I don’t know how I feel about people making this conflict all about them.” A classic New York putdown: GET OVER YOURSELF! And then another putdown: “I didn’t know the New York Times Magazine had a poetry section.”

Anne Boyer wrote a book, The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care, and I must admit that a book with that title is nothing I’d give a friend who’s going through treatment for cancer. It won a Pulitzer, maybe because the judges couldn’t bear to add Prize Denial to the Pain and Vulnerability.

Sitting at the opera, hearing the dying soprano sing to the tenor, “You are my love, you are my life,” it struck me as genuine, so much better than, “I’m dying, O the pain, vulnerability, mortality, lack of penicillin, and where is a doctor when you need one?” and the tenor, though he’d been a jerk, wept in her arms, and so should we all.

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Winter is here, people, and let’s face it — somebody has to live up here in the north, we can’t all sit around Mirage-a-Lounge, Florida, and play golf every day, somebody has to raise the soybeans and defend the border against the insatiable Canadians, and so here we are, putting on our puffy coats that make us look fat and stocking caps that destroy our hairstyle and heading out into the frigid blast and going to work and getting important stuff done, and not passing nuclear secrets around to our pals at the club or doubling the size of our penthouse on loan applications. I don’t know any Minnesotans who do that sort of thing.

When Hubert Humphrey was LBJ’s vice president, I’ll bet you anything he didn’t sit around Murray’s steakhouse in Minneapolis and show Canadian tycoons the formula for the H-bomb.

Frigid weather has its benefits, rectitude being one of them, and now I read about the Valley fever striking people in Southern California and Arizona, people who’ve inhaled flesh-eating fungi that leave them in agony, immobile, requiring rectal tubes to suck poisonous fumes from their bodies.

There is no flesh-eating fungus in Minnesota. Whatever else may ail you ­­— discouragement, lack of self-esteem, inability to self-advocate ­­— at least your food doesn’t taste mossy, you’re not coughing up mold from a deadly fungus that is recycling your innards. And now here is Thanksgiving for us northerners to celebrate our good fortune.

We are stoical people. Tranquilizers would be wasted on us. A big blizzard comes along, emergencies are declared, cars disappear under the drifts, teams of sled dogs take serum to isolated orphans in distant indigenous villages, still we strap on the skis and go to the office as if nothing were amiss.

Thanksgiving is inextricably tied to turkeys, a high-strung bird with no intellectual capacity whatsoever, liable to stampede in a rainstorm and pile up against a fence and suffocate by the thousands. They are bred for gigantic torsos, the white meat that is fairly tasteless — there is no gourmet cooking that involves turkeys, the bird is simply chow. And of course the name itself is a synonym for “failure.” To be a leading producer of stupid misshapen birds who panic easily is not a distinction to be craved, but Somebody Has To Do The Work, and so Minnesota produces a billion turkeys a year so that America can feel gratitude.

Minnesotans who might’ve written novels and won National Book Awards and appeared on talk shows instead spent their summer and fall supervising herds of brainless birds with giant bazooms. Imagine coming to New York and some slicker asks, “What do you do?” and you being honest say, “I raise turkeys.”

I tried to be a novelist and then had to take a job in radio at a little station in rural central Minnesota, near a couple of towns where men participated in the annual Polar Plunge in January, stripping naked and jumping into an icy body of water and splashing around and whooping and then climbing out and chugging a snootful of aquavit. It was an awesome thing to watch and it would be worth your while to google “Minnesota” and “Polar Plunge” and book a flight and see it for yourself. The men were thrilled to drop their robes and step out of their undies and stand on the dock, shivering, daring each other, as somebody busted up the ice, and finally breaking through the barrier of dread and landing in water that awakened every nerve cell in their body. (Women considered it obscene and never fought for the equal right to plunge, though obscene it was not: in icy water, the male organs diminish to the size of a dried peapod and two pumpkin seeds.)

I did not do the plunge myself but I experienced the same thing when I went into stand-up comedy. I’m a very shy person and I stand in the wings and feel dread and then walk out into the shock of applause and I forget what I’m supposed to say and it’s like a frozen lake.

Being a Minnesotan, I was brought up to feel guilt, something that the folks of Mirage-a-Lounge have never experienced. The words “I was wrong” or “I can’t believe I did that” have never been spoken there by men in extra-large white pants.

The cure for guilt is simple: step into the shower naked, and turn the knob marked C all the way on. This may also cure any fungal material. Just remember to remove any top-secret documents you may be storing there.

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I flew into New York last week into JFK, which would not be my choice but that’s where the plane landed. LaGuardia has been remade into a marble palace and JFK is an obstacle course to find out if you really really really want to come to New York or if you might rather go to Cleveland. The Statue of Liberty says, “Give me your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” and that’s JFK, huddled masses yearning to claim their baggage and find a taxi.

Your best strategy in dismal circumstances is militant cheerfulness. You say “Thank you” and “God bless you” to anyone who holds a door for you or lets you pass, you ask the taxi starter how he’s doing today, you address the cabbie as “My friend” and it really does brighten your day.

I don’t belong in New York, I’m a loner, I have the social skills of a hoot owl, but I accept the amusement that the city offers. I saw a dog on the subway with earbuds on and I asked the guy holding the leash what the dog was listening to and he said, “Those are hearing aids.” But he said it sort of sarcastically. You get a lot of irony in New York. So I asked my audiologist if there is such a thing as veterinary audiology and she said, “I think so because there is a hearing test for animals but I think it’s a branch of neurology.” She didn’t seem to want to delve into it.

As I stood there on the corner of West 74th I saw a woman with a little white dog on an odd leash that had two loops, one around each front leg, a sort of orthopedic leash with which she helped the dog stand upright. I was going to ask but I didn’t know how to phrase the question so I headed for the subway stop at 72nd and Central Park West. John Lennon was shot on that corner in 1980. I still feel anger in his behalf, he being two years older than I, he having been cheated of 43 years of walking around Central Park and noticing things. The bastard who shot him wasn’t just crazy, he was evil.

I don’t want to think about evil. I forced myself to read about the Hamas terrorist attacks on the kibbutzim in Israel, the casual slaughter of defenseless persons, women, children, infants, the brutality, the raping, the capture of civilian hostages, and after a big pro-Hamas rally on the Upper West Side, I read some more, including Bret Stephens’s excellent dispatch in the Times on the 12th.

I’m a romantic, not a realist. I love a photograph of two lovers kissing in the midst of a bustling city. There’s the famous Eisenstaedt photo of a sailor kissing a woman in Times Square on V-J Day, 1945, and there are others of couples in Paris and London and San Francisco, and each time I see one it speaks the joy of being in love and oblivious to the hullabaloo and the hustle, two humans in the midst of the crowd who hold the world in their arms when they embrace. I kissed Jenny once in the plaza of Lincoln Center and another time in the 42nd Street C-train station and I intend to do it again. I only wish she were taller.

I thought of John Lennon when I got on the train at his station and I wrote him a limerick.

I imagine John Lennon alive

Rides his bike along Riverside Drive

And sings cheerfully

At age 83

To the woman he’s taken to wive.

And then I wrote one for my friend Stephanie who writes them for friends on their birthdays:

A writer of limericks named Steph

Avoids loud sounds (treble clef)

And if you shriek,

Squeal, screech, or squeak,

She’ll ignore you as if she were deaf.

And then an elongated one, a limerick with an extra bedroom:

A former DA, Giuliani

Got a job as a lapdog for Donnie

But let’s say a prayer

For our old mayor

That he disclose

Everything that he knows

And sing in court, Hey nonny nonny.

I’m considering setting up a table in Central Park: “Custom-made Personal Limerick, $5. 50% discount for the discouraged.” Sit by the Reservoir path and crank out poems for Tom, Dick, Harry, Teresa, Delores, Hannah. I can’t change evil but I can make one person smile. You do what you can.

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I ate breakfast with a woman last week who, in the course of twenty minutes, sent four cups of coffee back to the kitchen because they didn’t meet her standards, a drip-brewed cup with milk, two lattes, and a latte with oat milk. (Her name does not begin with J.)

I’m not a newcomer to this world and I have never met a person with such exquisitely fine taste in the coffee realm. Wine, yes. Coffee, no. I say this with all due admiration. It’d be so easy to reproach her, what with wars and starvation and natural disasters and global warming and doxing and polls showing that a majority of Americans support blatant dishonesty and corruption, but I don’t go down the shaming road.

I come from Middle America, the part of the U.S. not mentioned in geography classes in schools on the East and West coasts so if you tell someone there that you’re from Minnesota, you may as well say Moldova or Burundi, and in Minnesota we’re grateful for any dark warm beverage you bring us. Probably Moldovans and Burundians feel likewise. Postum, Maxwell House instant, coffee made from ground acorns, whatever — Thank you so much.

As a result of coming from an insignificant place, I have no critical skills whatsoever. I could no more review a book than I could dance the tango. I go to an orchestra concert and enjoy looking around at nicely dressed people and the music sounds pretty good, too. Now and then my socks are knocked off but mostly I pull them up.

So I was astounded to see her hold a coffee cup up and say to the waiter, “This tastes like it came from a machine.” It was like having breakfast with someone who suddenly pulls a ukulele out of her purse and sings “Pu‘uanaulu” in Hawaiian. I envied her. I wish that someday I could learn how to do that.

This was a classy restaurant, by the way. This was not Mom’s Café across the street from the bus depot. A bowl of oatmeal cost $28 here and a toasted bagel with salmon went for $25. The service was very elegant. Male waiters set silverware and plates before us with the sort of finesse you’d expect if you were crowned royalty. It’s awesome to see young men accomplish this sort of finesse, a delicacy of wrist movement, a slight bow, the silent landing of the plate, no clatter. In Minnesota, male wait personnel just dump the chow in the trough, but these waiters seemed to have been trained by Martha Graham. And the food was good. I had scrambled eggs and they tasted eggy, not like the stuff you get at economy hotel buffets, which comes from a factory in Hoboken.

So my friend’s fussiness about the coffee was, in fact, a tribute to the excellence of the restaurant. (Did I mention that this was in Northern California, in a town where a small bungalow goes for $1.8 million and you can’t get a Tootsie Roll for less than five bucks?) She sent back the coffee with oat milk because it didn’t taste fresh. I’m in awe of that. In Minnesota, we feed oats to horses and they eat it, no questions asked.

As I write this, I am back home, it’s 5 a.m., my beloved is asleep, I have turned on the coffeemaker, and I’m waiting for her to walk in and sit on my lap and then I’m going to say, “We need a different brand of coffee beans. The bag you bought tastes grassy to me and also it just doesn’t have the edge it should have.”

She will look at me in astonishment. This level of discernment, coming from a Minnesota gopher. Maybe she’ll say, “So what? Sew buttons on your underwear.” Or maybe she’ll look at me with admiration and say, “I think you’re right. I’ve been thinking the same thing myself.”

And next Sunday at church, after the 10 a.m. service, as we stand around for coffee hour, maybe I’ll approach the rector and ask her, “Do you think this coffee tastes funny?” She has preached about the spirit of forgiveness, Jesus forgiving the two crooks on their crosses next to his, and I’m telling her that the coffee tastes sort of — I don’t know — metallic.

We’re in New York now. It ain’t Minneapolis. Life is a show. Be bold. For once in your life be outrageous. I may do this. Not next Sunday, but soon. Maybe in January.

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I went to a wedding in California last week, a beautiful wedding out under the eucalyptus trees, a rare pleasure for me, being at the age when friends are not vowing “till death us do part” but watching death part them, and it was fun. It being California, the men were very mellow, the women were all glamorous in bright strapless gowns and hugged each other and cried, “Oh my god, you look fabulous,” and effusiveness was the rule. The men were all socially engaged, tolerant of differences, committed to social justice. The parents stood up and gave speeches praising the bride and groom so lavishly, it made me wonder if the couple had been diagnosed with a fatal disease.

I’m from Minnesota where weddings are solemn and parents do not speak admiringly of their children. Not lavishly anyway. They worry. They wonder if the marriage will last. They wonder if the guests are having a good time. In Minnesota, it’s hard to tell.

Pride goeth before a fall and so my parents never praised me for fear it might lead to multiple felony indictments. They never bragged on us; it was good enough to be not bad. Grandpa Denham left Glasgow back when Glaswegians leaned out the window and shouted, “Comin’ oot!” and threw the contents of the chamber pot into the street and he arrived in Minneapolis and bought a house on Longfellow Avenue that had flush toilets. You didn’t walk down the street and get doused with manure. Not bad.

The California couple vowed faithfulness, of course, but they also pledged to love and support each other in times of sorrow and times of triumph, and the word “triumph” set off a buzzer in my head. This is marriage, it isn’t football. What triumph are we talking about? Perfect poached eggs? A prize-winning yard? Championship sex?

Maybe I’m suspicious of the word “triumph” because it contains the name of a particular presidential candidate famous for obsessive boastfulness. But I sat at the wedding dinner (which was not bad) and I thought back over my life, looking for triumph, and not finding it.

I was a mediocre student, which was advantageous for me in that it spared me illusions about triumph. I went to the U and went to work in radio the fall of my freshman year because radio announcing allowed me to impersonate intelligence without having to answer tough questions. I majored in English because I had a gift for writing passable term papers about books I only knew from reading CliffsNotes. My ambition was to be a journalist and I dropped out of college for a year to write for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, interviewing minor celebs and writing obits. I wound up hosting an early-morning radio show, which is what got me into comedy. It’s what people need at 6 a.m. in Minnesota. I spent forty-some years talking about the town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, and gradually became aware that some people enjoyed this, which gave me a sense of usefulness.

I had two unhappy marriages and then married this lovely woman sitting next to me under the trees in California and I am happy with her, often delighted, and I’m still thrilled when she walks up behind me at my desk and puts her hand on my shoulder, but I wouldn’t claim triumph. I love my work too but like every other Minnesotan I know, I shrink at extravagant praise and try to fend it off.

I’m grateful to Grandpa for coming to America. He fathered 13 children by his wife, Marian, including my mother, and in photographs Marian appears very haggard as if she were a prison inmate. My mother had six kids, which was much easier, and she loved us and even said so occasionally. She was fundamentalist but she loved comedy, especially Lucille Ball and Red Skelton and Burns & Allen, and I think of her when I have a good night in front of a crowd that likes the jokes. I once did my stand-up at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and I flew her and Dad over to see it and I did the story about the pontoon boat loaded with Lutherans and the man on the parasail scattering his grandma’s ashes and his near collision with the hot-air balloon, a complex puzzle involving public nudity and a canceled wedding and a sniffy dog, and I made the pieces fit and the audience fell apart and my mother said, “That was good.” Thank you, dear. Rest in peace, rise in triumph.

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A balmy, even summery, fall in Minnesota and then suddenly snow fell and my aging homeowner pals back home are reconsidering their options. The supply of teenage labor to shovel walks is spotty and you hear horror stories about ice buildup in the attic, water dripping from the ceiling, tons of ice inside the roof because the vapor barrier was put in wrong, and then of course there is the ever-present danger of slipping on a frosty sidewalk and twisting your back as you fall and something cracks and suddenly you are on the waiting list for Cripple Creek Care Center. A friend told me about a squirrel who’d climbed down the chimney to get warm and fell into the old coal furnace and tore around the house in a panic, scattering soot everywhere until they finally chased him out: “I got a .22 and I could’ve shot him but he was moving pretty fast and anyway the kids were watching and they were cheering for the squirrel.”

These are true Minnesotans, stalwarts, stoics, not summer soldiers, and the thought of decamping for the Florida swamps or the Arizona desert is for them something like gender transition or conversion to Zen Lutheranism, something to be postponed as long as possible.

I talked to Earl, the last friend of mine still farming, who had finished discing up his corn stubble just before the snow fell. “So you’re getting set for next spring?” I said. He said, “That’s under discussion right now.”

He’s 79, his wife is ready to sell the farm, their kids are long gone to distant places, she’d like to move to Arkansas where the oldest daughter lives with three grandkids. He’s Norwegian and I think that if Elaine stopped campaigning for Arkansas he’d come around and be in favor of it. He’s tired, his back hurts. But he’s lived here almost his entire life, he knows the history of this place going back 150 years.

I feel for them. I took the easy way out and absconded to New York to live in a big building with a super and a doorman, which is assisted living under another name. Dripping ceilings, invasive squirrels: the super deals with it. Winter is a rare event in Manhattan, a couple of decent snowfalls and thousands of apartment kids take their plastic saucers to the park and slide, and the next day it all melts.

“I got to get a new snow blower,” says Earl. “One you can ride on. That driveway keeps getting longer and longer.” I ask about Elaine and he tells me the joke about Lena going to the doctor because her hearing is so poor. He looks in her ear and finds a suppository stuck in it. “Well,” she says, “I guess that explains what happened to my hearing aid.” The doctor asks if she wants him to look and she says, “Let me think about it.”

These are my people. They know the same jokes I know. I ask again about Elaine and he says, “She’s fine,” and then he tells about Lena reminding Ole that her birthday is coming up and he says, “I know, what would you like? A diamond ring?” No, she says. “A trip to Mexico? A new car?” “No,” she says, and eventually she says, “I want a divorce.” He thinks and says, “Well, I wasn’t planning on paying that much.”

Despite damage to the ozone layer, corporate greed, various viruses, AI, the widespread acceptance of dishonesty in public life, my people persist. Other species are dying out, the family farm has been eulogized for years, other nuclear powers threaten to push authoritarianism farther even as America floats in a state of confusion, but I talk to old friends on the phone who are hanging on as best they can. Winter can be brutal: water freezes and expands and then it thaws, you’re rising and falling like a boat on the sea, you can hear the house creaking at night. But what can you do? Like Earl said, “A guy’s girlfriend called him up, crying, said, ‘I’ve lost my job, been evicted from my apartment, my car got totaled, and I’ve been diagnosed as bipolar and OCD. I can’t go on.’ The guy said, ‘Let me take you out dancing on Saturday.’

“She said, ‘I’m killing myself on Saturday.’ He said, ‘How about Friday then?’”

I’m heading for Minnesota in January for three weeks. Solidarity. Drop in for a cup of coffee and talk about winter when we were kids. That’s when winter was winter. Don’t get me started.

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The simple pleasures of a long close marriage on a perfect October day, leaves dropping from the trees, eating an egg salad sandwich after her long morning walk, playing Scrabble. She talks about who and what she saw on her hike and I, the writer, am silent in thought, having played the word “irony,” which triggers the memory of a day long ago in Saginaw, Michigan.

I’d gone there to give a speech — don’t remember the occasion, only that afterward, a man in a shiny blue suit said to me, “It’s so hard to get good speakers to come to Saginaw.” And it wasn’t clear if this was a compliment or an insult.

I went to Saginaw because my hero Theodore Roethke was from there, who wrote I knew a woman lovely in her bones, when small birds sighed she would sigh back at them. Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one. And the poem “Root Cellar”: Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch, Bulbs broke out of boxes … Shoots dangled and drooped … And what a congress of stinks … Roots ripe as old bait, pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich, leaf-mold, manure … Nothing would give up life: even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

He was bipolar, suffered repeated breakdowns, died at 55, and one of his students was my teacher, the poet James Wright who, when I knew him, was going through a miserable time, hungover when the class met at 8 a.m., chain-smoking his way through the hour, and yet I remember him for Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, twilight bounds softly forth in the grass and the eyes of those two Indian ponies darken with kindness, they have come gladly out of the willows to welcome my friend and me. He was rescued by his second wife, Annie, and they enjoyed a close tender marriage. And Roethke’s lines about Beatrice O’Connell’s lovely bones and sighing at small birds strike me as husbandly, not the impressions of a first date.

“Are you happy?” my partner asks. I am and I’m sorry if silence is heard as sadness. So many memories are attached in a long skein, you pull on “irony” and out comes Saginaw and the troubled lives of brilliant writers and yet what I remember are the root cellar, the kindness of Indian ponies, the woman lovely in her bones.

This woman’s lovely bone structure has fascinated me for thirty years. We live in New York because she likes it there. I am a Minnesotan, descended from patient taciturn persons, herdsmen, and when dealing with large animals you don’t lecture them, you simply close off all other avenues and whack them where it won’t do damage. These skills don’t work in polite society.

Saturday we sat in Connecticut with a niece and nephew and their three-month-old boy and it all came back to us, the memory of the paraphernalia of parenthood, the car seat/carrier, stroller, burp rag, bottles, diaper bag. A handsome infant who smiles, even giggles, and you can see his gaze take in the whole scene, the trees, the birds sighing, the congress of stinks, the bounding twilight, the bone structure of his mother as she plants smackers on his cheeks. This boy has a future I can’t begin to imagine. In the midst of our visit, a phone call from our daughter who was going to come visit us this afternoon and now is begging off, she has other social plans. She is 26. “You don’t feel bad, do you?” she asks, and I do but how can you not be pleased that your progeny is happily busy?

So we get in the car and head home to the city in a river of taillights, my sweetheart at the wheel, muttering directions to other drivers, her husband dozing, recalling Saginaw, the great poet whose breakdowns became more frequent and required hospitalization, who left us poems that once you read them you’ll never forget them. His generation of intellectuals romanticized madness as a byproduct of genius and mine does not. The river of red lights flows under bridges and then along the Hudson and into Manhattan and we turn off the highway and into the city grid down a narrow street and stop at Amsterdam as parents push a baby stroller across. Life goes on. Despite the horrible breakdowns, the root cellar is the heart of it all. The damp tendrils, shoots, bulbs, even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

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An ordinary late October day and the world is dense with stately trees in variations of reds and gold and orange that Crayola never contemplated — no need to shop around for magic mushrooms or give up your life as a good citizen for something involving incense and flutes — just walk down the street ignoring the Halloween skeletons and let your heart be lifted. I’m descended from stoics, our emotional range runs from A to D, once or twice we’ve hit L, never W for wonderment but here I am in New York where something in the water encourages self-expression and I see a man on the subway platform do some little dance moves he’d maybe seen in the theater the night before. He’s not a dancer but he doesn’t let that stop him.

A short woman approaches and speaks something to me and I see she’s holding a cardboard tray of candies and a little boy clutches her pant leg and I remember reading about the Ecuadoran refugees who’ve come to the city, the women earning money just this way, and I reach into my pocket and pull out a twenty, which is a lot to pay for a small bag of M&Ms but how do you put a value on the look in the boy’s eyes. He is three or four and very keen. A train is coming into the station. This must be all strange to him but he isn’t frightened thanks to his anchor. He studies me, then the crowd emerging from the open doors, a man with a handsome dog on a leash, a guitarist playing into a little amp on the platform, and I board the train. But those dark eyes stay with me.

The classic story: the elders make a desperate choice to spare their children the grief of history and put language and life story behind and become as children themselves in order to start anew. So you learn as much English as you need — “Please,” the woman said, and then “Thank you,” and soon the little boy’s English will race on ahead of hers, but you will always address your Creator in the old tongue, and so, the next Sunday, leaving my Episcopalians I walk through clouds of happy Spanish emerging from Our Lady down the street, women clustered around the priests, children orbiting around them, men smoking.

And then there’s me, a reverse refugee, returning to the Anglicans my evangelical forebears escaped from. They were serious scholars of doctrine, the ultraorthodox of Protestantism, disputatious, separatist, and in the end rather arid, choosing the deserts of correctness to the green pastures of love and mercy, and when I go to church I go to commune with my aunts. The uncles were the stoics, the aunts were generous, even lavish with affection, just as this October day is.

Some old liberal pals have thought about maybe finding a new country if the unthinkable happens next year but that’s silly. The MAGAticians have elected a Speaker, second in line to the Presidency, who upholds this country as a theocracy and believes Halloween is evil and who imagines the ghosts of children destroyed by Roe v. Wade, and since the stolen election has given us an outlaw government, I imagine he’d favor a constitutional convention that could give us the President for Life that so many people crave. This may sell in Shreveport but it’s heavy baggage to be trucking around to the talk shows.

A party that holds such reverence for the semiautomatic rifle that its reps are tongue-tied in the face of mass murder in Maine is lacking a heart, not to mention brain matter. All Republicans could do was say they were praying for the victims. The prayers of politicians tend to be pro forma. Prayer is not the best means of preserving peace. The FBI does not rely on prayer in searching for a lunatic SOB who grew up in a family of gun-lovers and decided to confront his demons in a bowling alley and a bar in Lewiston.

If you think the Second Amendment guarantees terrorists a right to carry assault weapons, ballistic missiles, nuclear weaponry, then you need to find another country to live in and leave the rest of us to enjoy the woods of October. I pray that Speaker Johnson finds his mind; America is not a Southern Baptist country. It’s where Mike and I can be next-door neighbors, be amiable over the fence, watch over each other’s property, be a help when needed, he can hand out gospel tracts on Halloween, I can be a ghost, but if he shows me his collection of assault rifles, I’m moving to a better neighborhood.

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