Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 22

Any American who saw Jim Jordan, the alleged chair of the so-called House Judiciary Committee, on TV Wednesday could’ve been charged with contempt of Congress for his harassment of Judge Merrick Garland, an excellent legal mind and dedicated public servant, Mr. Jordan being a bully and a hack from a gerrymandered district in Ohio who got his law degree from a church school in Columbus and never took the bar exam. He was a champion wrestler in the featherweight class and though heftier now, maintains his featherweight status. He never held a job but went straight from college into politics. Interviewed in 2018 and asked if he’d ever heard Donald Trump tell a lie, he said, “I have not.” He has been called “nuts” by Lindsey Graham, who knows about nuttiness. He voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election and then sent a note to the White House asking for a pardon in the event he was prosecuted. Ten days before leaving office, Mr. Trump gave Jordan the Presidential Medal of Freedom in a closed-door ceremony. He appeared before me Thursday under an independent subpoena issued pursuant to 515.2 U.S.C. and I hereby read into the record his testimony:

ME: A whistleblower has submitted a detailed firsthand account of you beating your wife and I ask: when exactly did the beating cease?

HIM: I wish to say that —

ME: Answer the question, Yes or No.

HIM: If I may, this is a —

ME: Let me ask this: when did you discontinue your use of fentanyl and was your dealer not a man named Guido who ran a shoeshine stand outside a porn shop?

HIM: I have no idea —

ME: Was it recently or are you still using?

HIM: If you’ll please allow me —

ME: Look at this photograph of a crippled dog: did you kick the dog or did you instruct someone else to do it and are you familiar with animal cruelty statutes in Ohio?

HIM: I don’t know exactly —

ME: When President Trump urged Americans to take disinfectant by injection as a cure for COVID, did you do as he told you to do?

HIM: If you will permit me—

ME: I yield to the gentleman from Oklahoma.

ROGERS: There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you. If all politicians fished instead of speaking publicly, we would be at peace with the world. That’s why I love dogs: they do nothing for political reasons.

ME: Thank you. The HJC is the best show on television and it is predicated on the assumption that 51% of American voters have the intelligence of an adolescent Hereford and they take yelling and smirking as evidence of high principle whereas studies show that only 31% of the voters are certified idiots. I yield to the gentleman from Baltimore.

MENCKEN: Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses. If a Republican had cannibals among his constituents, he’d promise them missionaries.

ME: The HJC hearing Wednesday was viewed by only a million or so, most Americans having work to do, but it was fascinating to watch elected representatives work hard to create an elaborate distraction about Joe Biden’s wayward son even though Garland had given a Trump appointee the powers of a special prosecutor and there was no issue but the representatives created the sound of conflict by rapid-fire questioning. I ask unanimous consent to enter into the record —

EDITOR: Without objection, so entered.

HIM: What is Hunter Biden’s shoe size?

GARLAND: I do not —

HIM: Were his footprints not found on the floor of the Biden garage next to the deep freeze where bundles of hundred-dollar bills were packed into a Ukrainian ukulele in the vegetable tray? Yes or No?

GARLAND: With all due respect —

HIM: And is it not true that Hunter Biden discarded his illegally obtained pistol into a dumpster where it could’ve been found by a ten-year-old child and used to carry out a mass slaughter in an elementary school?

GARLAND: I’m sorry but I am —

ME: I recognize the gentleman from Missouri.

TWAIN: There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress. It has a kindly feeling for idiots, and a compassion for them, on account of personal experience and heredity.

Thank you, Mr. Twain. The column is adjourned.

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A good week is a good week; let smarter people deal with the debt ceiling crisis and popularity of authoritarianism, my week began with a happy Sunday in church with a lot of blessing going on — sprinkling the schoolkids, the choir, the congregation — and our rector looking joyful as she marched around casting holy water on people — I thought she might like to use a squirt gun or a watering can or the sprinklers in the ceiling. Her sermon cautioning against perfectionism was, for want of a better word, perfect, and we sang a lively Shaker hymn —

O brethren ain’t you happy, ye followers of the Lamb.
Sing on, dance on, followers of Emmanuel,
Sing on, dance on, ye followers of the Lamb.

which for an old fundamentalist brought up to believe that rhythmic movement of any sort is wickedness incarnate, was rather exciting. And we confessed to a whole new set of sins such as wasting the earth’s resources, treating its inhabitants unjustly, and “holding future generations hostage to our greed,” which immediately made me feel bad about Medicare, and we admitted to not observing our kinship with all of God’s creatures, which seemed to say we’d now embark on a vegan diet, which I’m not yet ready to do, I’ve given up pride and greed and envy but not the bacon cheeseburger.

I flew off to Minneapolis to attend a Twins game and stayed with my beloved in a hotel that used to be the Milwaukee Road depot where, when I was 18, I took the Hiawatha train to Chicago solo, a big step toward independence and sophistication. The old train shed still stands and I walked under it and recalled the tweed sport coat and chinos I wore, the knapsack I carried, the pack of Marlboros in my pocket. But that was then and this is now.

Minneapolis was my big city as a kid growing up among the truck farms to the north, and at the age of 10 I rode my bike into town past the manufacturing plants that have been converted to condos and through the red-light district, which is now respectable, to the public library and big rooms with long tables piled with fresh new books and if that doesn’t make you want to be an author, then what will? I mostly love the changes and ignore the rest.

At the game I sat next to a true Twins fan named Alex who gave me the lowdown on various players and yelled the right things — “Looked good to me!” at the ump who’d called a strike a ball and “Good eye!” at a Twin who let Ball 3 go by and “Throw him the meatball!” at the opposition pitcher who had an 0-2 count on a Twins batter.

It was a big pleasure, the proximity to genuine fandom. I’m old and out of touch. I paid $45 for a Twins cap: in my mind, it should’ve been $5. The Kramarczuk’s bratwurst stand doesn’t take cash, only credit cards. I don’t get it. What country is this? But I bought one, with kraut and mustard. I’m not used to the raucous music blaring every half-inning though it thrilled the row of girls ahead of us who stood up, hips shaking, arms waving. I come from the era of intense silence. I may be the only person in the ballpark who remembers the fall day in 1969 when Rod Carew got on base with a double, took a big lead, stole third, and the fans sat transfixed in silence, knowing he might do it, wishing he’d do it, and then he did it — he took a daring lead off third and dashed home and slid under the tag and we jumped up and yelled, “YES!” We didn’t need the Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” to rouse us, the feat of stealing home was enough. I can still see it in my mind, his perfect timing, the headlong slide.

But there were three triples hit that day, a classic exciting moment, the ball hit to a far corner and perhaps bobbled, the fleet runner dashing, the base coaches windmilling him on. It’s still clear in my memory, and so is the Shaker hymn, which I hope the choir does again someday and if they start dancing, I’ll join them. And someday I may bring a little pipette of water so that if the rector blesses us, I can bless her right back. And bless you, dear reader. Here comes the meatball.

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Never mind what you’ve been taught, some problems have simple solutions. The cure for bad habits — lying, for example — is to stop doing it. Don’t waste a psychoanalyst’s time trying to discover the underlying causes of lying — the basic cause of lying is stupidity, or arrogance, take your pick.

And then there’s the problem of Supreme Court ethics and justices accepting valuable perks from billionaire pals, which may lead to a conflict of interest or the appearance of one. The simple answer is to raise their salaries: a quarter-million a year is not nearly enough to support a Supremacy lifestyle in D.C. There are psychoanalysts who earn more than that. Raise the salary to a million-five so Clarence Thomas can afford to charter a jet and not be indebted to a robber baron. Require the justices’ clerks to spend two years as public defenders before they shop around for fancy jobs with big firms in 15th-floor suites with big walnut credenzas.

And the unprecedented dilemma of a presidential candidate under multiple indictments and his trials possibly delayed until after the election: the answer is to break precedent and conduct a single trial on national television with the entire adult population empaneled as a jury. Let the nation hear the evidence and render a verdict. Then hold the election, and if he’s a convicted felon, send in a substitute.

I came up with these ideas at 4 a.m., which is when I do my best thinking and thank goodness I’m a writer so my business hours begin upon awakening and sipping my first cup of coffee. I think everything would work much better if everyone woke up at 4 and spent a few hours thinking, then went to the office at 9 with good ideas. Work until 2 and go home. Nothing good happens after 2 p.m. You know it and I know it.

Waking up at 4 a.m. is my idea of “woke,” not the stuff and nonsense that goes by that name. I’m not that brand of woke, Bud, and that’s no joke. It’s all smoke and a whole glossary of gelatinous phraseology by which the dreamers in our midst rain fire down on behalf of victims of yesteryear while ignoring the cruelties of today under vicious tyrants whose victims head for — guess where? — America to find decency and to survive, meanwhile the dreamers give the bullies of the right a dead horse to beat and thereby elect officialdom to enthrone tycoons and beat the peasantry into submission.

America is a good country that’s provided hope and sustenance to countless refugees. I take an Uber car and the driver is usually Hispanic or Muslim, often with limited English, but thanks to GPS they can navigate and earn decent money. I encounter workers every day whose English is limited, who may well be refugees, and whatever life they make here is a vast improvement over violence and starvation back home.

I do my best problem-solving after waking from wacko dreams in which tall pines fall and comets crash as fierce carnivorous beasts clamber out of the stormy sea and I ferry a band of foreign orphans across a raging river to a safe haven. I wake from this drama feeling cleansed of all anxiety, and anxiety — dread, the yips, creeps, sense of malaise, call it what you will — is the enemy of clear thinking. My dear mother was a worrier and she never left the house without imagining she had left a faucet running, the oven on, a door unlocked, and so she sat in church contemplating grim scenarios of flood and fire and robbers when she should’ve been praising God for His watchfulness over us.

In her old age, Mother lightened up a great deal and put her worries aside and when she was 94 I put her aboard a flight to visit Scotland, her ancestral homeland, and she, a formerly fearful flyer, was lighthearted as a schoolgirl. She suffered some hard blows, the deaths of beloved sisters, the death of her oldest son, Philip, the loss of her husband, but these troubles seemed to rid her of anxiety. She adopted the wisdom of old age — when your time is running out, why waste it on worrying about what might happen, enjoy each day as it comes — and now that I’m old I’ve adopted it too. I wake up at 4 a.m. and I am truly grateful. I plan to go to Scotland in the spring. Why not? Let’s go.

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The time I have spent looking for my glasses — over the 70 years since I got glasses in the fourth grade, it must add up to a couple thousand hours, roaming nearsighted from room to room, bathroom, bedside table, desk, kitchen counter, coffee table, maybe six months of eight-hour days — a person could train for a triathlon in that time, find a cure for foot fungus, write a memoir — and yet, looking back over this endless series of ridiculous frenzies, I see how what a classic comedy it is, the half-blind man searching for his sightedness, and how can the regular reenactment of comedy do anything but make a man cheerful? I ask you.

Add to this my other blunders, stumbles, screwups and snafus in family life, professional career, political path, real estate — good Lord, the majestic apartment on Trondhjemsgade in Copenhagen that I bought, 13-foot ceilings, elaborate molding, a view of Ørstedsparken, you could’ve entertained royalty in the dining room or negotiated the union of Denmark and Sweden — I quit my radio show at the peak of its popularity and took my Danish wife to live in splendor and sit with her friends speaking my kindergarten Danish — my mind boggles: What was I thinking?

And the reader answers: “The problem was that you had too much money.” And the reader is quite right. But nonetheless what happened to the frugality of my parents John and Grace, shopping at Sears, darning socks, the meals of fried smelt, the hand-me-downs, why did I throw this overboard?

It’s comedy, pure and simple. The man walks out his front door, is drenched by the neighbor’s water sprinkler, turns away and steps on a rake, his head is bleeding, he goes back to the door and finds he’s locked himself out. It’s the human condition: too soon old, too late smart.

But I found my glasses today. They were in my jacket pocket. Sometimes they’re in a shirt pocket, sometimes perched on top of my head. The frenzy ends, the problem solves itself. The comedian is grateful. He looks around and appreciates the beauty of the day, the here and now. It’s 5 a.m. My love is asleep in the bedroom, my daughter in her bedroom. I look out at the lights of New York. I make coffee, take my meds. The day awaits. There is work to be done. Then daughter Maia and I will take a brisk walk around Central Park. There will be lunch, a nap, a phone call, perhaps from cousin Elizabeth explaining how Our Lord, though omniscient and omnipotent, nonetheless experienced our mortality with all its sorrows and pain, or maybe cousin Joyce planning our trip to Scotland, or cousin Richard reminiscing about his travels in Africa. I am rich with cousins. My love has only a couple of second cousins. I have dozens. Cousin Stan is 90, my mentor. Elizabeth is my conscience, Dan my doctor, Susie my family  historian, Janice my authority on cheerfulness. Dad had six siblings, Mother twelve. This connects me to hundreds of people, including a month-old great-nephew.

As Van Morrison sang:

These are the days now that we must savor
And we must enjoy as we can.
These are the days that will last forever,
You’ve got to hold them in your heart.

Somehow the ridiculous missteps of my life lead to this day in September, the back-to-school month, and in my heart I am still walking into the old high school, anxious to do well in Lyle Bradley’s biology and Helen Story’s English and even in Stan Nelson’s phy-ed. I’m an oddball but I have friends. Miss Story assigns us to memorize a Shakespeare sonnet and for some reason she assigns me Sonnet No. 29, “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state,” and it is still intact in my mind, the series of complaints and then — “Yet in these thoughts … haply I think on thee, and then my state, like to the lark at break of day arising from sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate.”

Miss Story grew up on a farm in southern Minnesota, never married, devoted herself to teaching and reading and travel and was a passionate Shakespearean. She assigned me the poem. The poet feels wretched, envies the good fortune of others who have not walked into sprinklers and stepped on rakes, and then he is awakened by love and returns to the present. I don’t need glasses for this. It’s planted in my head, as fresh and green as when I was 17.

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It’s been a busy summer for this old retired guy due to the fact that it takes twice as long to get half as much done due to voice-activated Google, which means I can say, “How exactly am I related to Katharine Hepburn?” and the computer screen does some backflips and flashes the answer, “You and she are descended from Elder John Crandall, 1618–1676, Westerly, Rhode Island,” which I have known for years but it makes me feel good to see it again, given the fact that by the age of 81 a man has accumulated a truly stunning list of mishaps, bungles, fiascos, and debacles, all of which are unaffected by dementia but shine bright and clear, warning buoys on the reefs of despair.

Google is a marvel and also a pernicious addiction. Back in the day I focused on the work before me, the sheet of paper in the Underwood typewriter, and didn’t follow the whims of curiosity because it would involve hauling down Webster’s Third Unabridged or the Encyclopedia Britannica or World Almanac, but now if I’m curious I can instantly find out what year Buddy Holly’s plane crashed (1959) or which popes fathered children (many) or who was the first daredevil to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and survive (a schoolteacher, Annie Edson Taylor, in 1901 at the age of 63), none of which have anything to do with the project at hand.

And so here it is, September, and I’ve yet to go to a ball game, so I went online and bought a ticket to see the Minnesota Twins and also a plane ticket to Minneapolis, since I live in New York now. Baseball is crucial to my sense of order in the universe, that and the analog clock, the Seven Deadly Sins, the Boy Scout Law, the Bill of Rights, the multiplication tables, the rules of English grammar, the Beatitudes, and of course the 50 state capitals. Sometimes I forget Delaware’s (Dover) and Wyoming’s (Cheyenne), but mostly they’re fixed in my mind, just as three strikes means you’re out, three outs and you’re done, and the runner must tag up until the fly is caught before he can advance. These are written in stone.

I’ll sit behind the visitors’ dugout at the ballpark and my sense of order will be restored, same as when I recite the Twenty-third Psalm, it still says that the Lord restoreth my soul and my cup runneth over, it doesn’t say He awakens my consciousness or that I resonate with authenticity.

We live in changing times and when you reach 81 you know this for sure. My people were early risers who enjoyed Grape-Nuts and Hills Brothers coffee for breakfast, followed by a chapter of Scripture, more often Isaiah or Jeremiah than the Gospels. They kept chickens and large vegetable gardens so as not to pay outlandish prices for food. They wrote letters legibly in grammatical sentences and were fond of sad songs about lost love and premature death and were wary of strangers, shunned saloons and theaters, and preferred silence to small talk. The aunts and uncles are all gone now and I doubt that any of my cousins find it worthwhile to behead and defeather a chicken. We are, after all, college graduates. So we purchase frozen chicken breasts wrapped in plastic and we text with our phones and make small talk with seatmates on the plane and drink wine in public but glance over our shoulders first. There are dozens of brands of granola on the grocery shelf and we keep trying new varieties such as the pumpkin/pineapple/winter wheat in hopes it will lead to new insights, and we skip Jeremiah for the daily news and sad songs depress us, we prefer dance beats, and we pay exorbitant prices for exotic coffee beans that we choose from a list recommended by coffee journalists at the New York Times. But baseball is still baseball. The double play is as exciting as ever and the bases-loaded homer and even more exciting, the triple and the double-steal, the runner on first heading for second, the long throw as the runner on third comes home.

I’ll go to the game with two friends one-third my age who are engaged to be married. Marriage is one more thing that hasn’t changed — the happy marriage hasn’t. There is an endless variety of available misery but happiness — there’s no need to google it — requires a cheerful disposition, a vocation, someone to put your arms around and converse with, and having a small cup so it runneth over more easily. And meekness and mercy and making peace are good too.

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The birth of the spotless giraffe at a zoo in Tennessee, the only known one on earth, is important news to those of us who grew up as oddballs, seeing the spotted mama giraffe nuzzling her child, remembering the kindness of aunts and teachers who noticed our helpless naivete and guided us through the shallows.

And then there was the story of the cable car in Pakistan that lost a couple cables and dangled helplessly hundreds of feet in the air with terrified children inside. A nightmare in broad daylight. A rescuer harnessed to the remaining cable had to bring the children one by one to safety.

It dawns on you, watching this, that what makes a society a civilized society is the existence of rescuers who will put themselves at risk in service to others. It isn’t having a street system or social media or manufacturing capacity that define civil society, it’s public service.

The giraffe is a bony creature whose meat is too lean and sinewy for our taste and nobody has thought to saddle them up and race them and their hide doesn’t suit us particularly and so they were never bred by man as horses and cattle were, so this spotless child belongs to a species in steep decline, just as I do, being a writer.

I was a mediocre student so the academic life was never an option for me: there were no grants or fellowships available; I needed to earn my way by writing. I admired journalists like A.J. Liebling and Murray Kempton and was lucky to be able to support my family by putting words on paper. And in the course of it, I encountered numerous rescuers, such as the editors Roger Angell and Bill Whitworth. You labor month after month in your gloomy study and feel you are dangling by a wire and one day you walk to the end of the driveway and there’s a letter in the mailbox with two or three paragraphs of lavish encouragement and without that, I’d have become a parking lot attendant.

Which is not to say that attending a parking lot is an unworthy occupation. It’s a monastic calling and great good has been accomplished by monks. Look at Luther, look at Buddha. He didn’t park cars but he wandered as a beggar, meditating, taking life simply, and attained enlightenment, and enlightenment is, I must admit, not my strong suit. I sat the other morning at breakfast listening to a friend talk about the Medicis and Machiavelli and Michelangelo, and it occurred to me, as it has so often lately, that I am an uneducated 81-year-old man and it is too late for me to catch up with the class.

I supported my family by entering into the amusement business and I’m still in it. Last Sunday, I did a show under a big tent in Bayfield, Wisconsin, that a thousand people enjoyed considerably for two hours. They liked my advocacy of the advantages of old age. They laughed at the line about not going to Taylor Swift concerts because the vulnerabilities she sings about I forgot long ago — if she sang about the pleasure of a long happy marriage I’d be interested but I doubt I’ll live long enough to know if she discovers that. They liked when I said I found people’s stories more interesting than their political opinions. And that tolerance comes from loving individuals as individuals and therefore accepting their cranky beliefs and bizarre theories. And also the song from my childhood: “Passengers will please refrain from flushing toilets while the train in standing in the station, I love you. When the train is in the station, you must practice constipation; if the train can’t go then why should you?” There was a lot of singing, including “America” and some falsetto R&B and the sounds of a man swallowed by a whale and living in its stomach and then being expelled out the rear.

It didn’t solve the problem of microplastics or the Republican landslide victory of 2020 that was stolen by Hunter Biden’s friends in Venezuela who manipulated the voting machines, but a thousand people enjoyed each other’s company, and I intend to keep going so as to justify the money Medicare put out to pay for the replacement of my mitral valve with one from a young pig, and also justify the sacrifice of the pig. I am deeply moved by America’s faith in the goodness of longevity, even for giraffes like me. I don’t take that for granted. Thank you very much.

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I prefer not to write about politics because I find people’s stories about personal experience more interesting than their opinions about what’s wrong with America, which tend to be secondhand or thirdhand.

And absurdity doesn’t interest me. You have an ex-president running for the White House who may be headed for a federal facility other than the White House unless he can win the election and pardon himself, meanwhile his leading opponents in the primaries go out of their way to avoid criticizing him and they focus on the legal problems of the incumbent president’s son.

Some of my best friends are evangelicals but I avoid them because I am afraid they may admire Putin and have taken up with a porn star and are thinking about shooting someone on Fifth Ave. So I don’t go there.

I walked home from church Sunday, a fine sunny day in New York. Church was wonderful, as usual. It was fun to hear the preacher take up the story of Jesus rebuking the Canaanite woman who asks for his help and Our Lord sounds like a jerk but the woman persists and persuades Him that He has been sent not only to the Jews but also to the whole world, which seems to indicate that the first Christian convert is Christ. The Communion hymn was “It Is Well with My Soul,” and after my Grand Canyon sunrise experience I did feel that it is well with my soul, which has not always been true. Suffice it to say that the Anglican prayer of confession is rather breezy in my case. A man of 81 cannot confess in thirty seconds, he needs hours.

My walk home takes me past sidewalk cafes, two playgrounds, a basketball court, the stoops of brownstones where elderly men younger than I watch the world go by, and it is a very pleasant walk especially after church, after the priest has blessed us and sent us into the world to do what we were put here to do. The Canyon at sunrise was stunning but this walk is stunning in its own sweet way. I pass throngs of my neighbors whom I have been told to love as I love myself but I’m a Midwesterner and “I love myself” is not anything I would ever say. Maybe a New Yorker would but not I.

But I do love these people, my fellow pedestrians, shoppers, diners, jaywalkers, joggers, skateboarders, stoop sitters.

The problem with evangelical Christianity may be the big parking lots. People leave the megachurch and get in their cars and drive and within 10 minutes they are calling on God to condemn another motorist to hellfire for making an illegal left turn.

I walk 12 blocks home in New York and I have never condemned anyone to eternal damnation. Never. I watch very carefully for e-bikes in the bike lanes, riders who may not stop at red lights but I do not ask that eternal torment be thrust upon them. If one of them ran me down and I had to spend weeks or months of my limited lifespan recovering from injury, I might consider asking for some form of torment such as 15 to 30 days in the slammer but nothing of an eternal brimstone nature. I walk home in a spirit of love. This is the politics of happiness.

The purpose of civil government is not to seek revenge against people we imagine think they are better than us. It is to serve the people I see as I walk home from church. I would help someone in trouble if I could but I’m only a writer. I know a woman whose home is uninhabitable and so she sleeps in her car and lives on food stamps and donations from friends and she bathes in the lavatory at Walmart or Costco. She is a decent intelligent Lutheran woman who is living the life of Job and in this supposedly Christian country we are so suspicious of the poor that she must run an obstacle course of bureaucratic barricades to survive but apparently she is a survivor, having taken a series of hard blows and come through with spirit intact. There are people in the Hawaiian paradise who find themselves in a similar situation. It could happen to any of us.

Church is a treatment for narcissism. I am not Number One, I am beholden to my Maker, I need to pay attention to the Divine, to live rightly with my fellow pedestrians, and part of church is the walk down this narrow canyon of high-rises and seeing the faces and hearing the voices. Make me an instrument of Thy Love, Sir.

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In homage to my ancestor David Powell, I rode a train across Kansas heading for Colorado, his goal in 1859 when he left Martha Ann and the children behind in Missouri and headed for the gold rush. Kansas is a state of vastness, some of it seems undisturbed since David rode across it. Here is a little farm near the tracks with no neighbor for several miles. A good place for an introvert like me. I could tow a trailer out on the treeless prairie and pull the shades and sit there and slowly go insane, buy a couple rifles with scopes, and yell at the TV about government oppression.

David was an extrovert. He was a leader of his wagon train and organized the lashing of wagons together to cross the rivers. He hunted antelope with the Arapaho and traded with them. He arrived in Colorado too late to get rich and instead sat in the territorial legislature and helped draft a state constitution. At age 62, an old man in those times, he settled in Kansas and wrote to his children: “I built a house 21r x 24r, one-story of pickets, shingle roof, 6 windows and 2 doors, divided and will be when finished one like my house in MO. Dug a well 20 feet deep, plenty of water, and put up a stable for 10 head of stock, covered with hay. We have done very well with oats and I have 25 tons of timothy hay, not yet sold. I am very comfortable, the times are fair here in Kansas, we are all well except for a touch of influenza. Our love and best wishes to all, yours affectionately.”

I assume the r means rods, which would be a considerable structure for an old man to build. What I admire is the cheerful tone. He is the father of eleven kids, including Isaac Newton Powell and Harriet Beecher Powell, which indicates he was a progressive. There are no references to the Lord in the letters, so he was not an evangelical, maybe a free-thinker.

Kansas flew past me, long stretches of brush and wild grassland as we headed west under an overcast sky, the train rocking as we rolled, an occasional coulee, no crossroads for miles and miles. David hoped to strike it rich but recognized the reality of the situation and set out to be useful instead and was elected mayor of Pueblo. Last week, as the train rolled through the first of the foothills, I wanted my man to talk to me and tell me what to do with my remaining days.

I am very comfortable, as he was, and married well, likewise, which is more than an old rounder deserves, but I have flashes of big ambition, which is lunacy for a gentleman of the geezer class. A screenplay? Get over yourself. A movie in which ordinary small-town Midwesterners suddenly burst into song about the simple pleasures of summer? It’s 2023, pal. That movie was outdated around the time you were born. What a man your age should do is accept the diminutions of age and find a shady porch and reread the classics of his youth, Oliver Twist and Anna Karenina and Walden, War and Peace, Walt Whitman, and see what more they have to say.

Time passed. I awoke from a nap. We were in the hills and canyons now. A tunnel through a mountain. I dozed off. I was awakened by the conductor’s voice on the loudspeaker: “Next station stop, Pueblo. This will be a brief stop, three minutes. Feel free to step down off the train but don’t wander off. We’ll be boarding in three minutes.” So I stepped off into brilliant sunshine. Cool air, we were almost at 7,000 feet. A sandy lot and the main drag and a short row of brick storefronts. I don’t think David came west for the money, I think it was for the pleasure of venturing into the unknown, and when he saw the mob of would-be miners he quickly got busy elsewhere, including Pueblo.

I was looking for his advice and I only had three minutes and I’m pretty sure it was succinct and sweet: Leave the big chances to the young ones and live your life, counting the days, applying your heart unto wisdom, cherish what you love, take no meetings, go for long walks. And the conductor yelled, “BOARD,” drawing out the O just as in David’s day, and the whistle blew and onward we went.

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I am delighted by the court ruling in Montana that the state, by encouraging the use of fossil fuels, violated the constitutional right of young people to “a clean and healthful environment,” something no court has ever proclaimed before. “Clean and healthful environment” is in the Montana state constitution. The legislature had forbidden state agencies to consider climate change when considering fossil fuel projects, and this decision would change that, but the state will appeal and likely the decision will be tossed away like used tissue, but still it’s an interesting idea: that we have legal obligations to our kids beyond feeding and clothing them and not putting them to work in shoe factories before they’re 12.

Nobody suggested back in the Fifties that we kids had a constitutional right to a “natural and healthful attitude toward sex” nor did I consider asking a court to reverse the deep sense of shame instilled in me, which has messed up my life to the extent that I dare not see a therapist for fear I’d discover things nobody should ever know about himself.

I was a troubled adolescent with bad hair and no idea how to extend my arm around a girl. It seemed as difficult as a one-armed chin-up. A friend and I went to a Pete Seeger concert and he invited a couple of girls and soon there were five of us and a girl sat on my lap in the backseat, a ballet dancer with muscular buttocks. She loved classical music so I got a job at a classical radio station but she dumped me for a botanist. It was just that simple. I had no dream of being a broadcaster, I was only out to impress the girl with the buttocks. Instead of romance I got a career. Romance came along when I was 50. Life isn’t supposed to be like that. Where is the justice?

My parents have left the planet so I can’t sue them and my teachers are gone too so I can’t argue that they violated my constitutional right to a “useful and healthful education,” much as I might wish to. Algebra was a complete waste of time, the multiplication of fractions is a skill I’ve not used for 10 seconds in the past 70 years, same with calculus and chemistry, and the history they taught was half fraudulent fables, and my time trying to translate Latin would’ve been better spent in learning basic plumbing: veni, vidi, whooshi, I came, I saw, I unclogged.

I’m all in favor of the kids in Montana and believe that “clean and healthful environment” should include plain ordinary honesty in politics, a sound education in English prose style, free mental health services, nonpunitive parenting, and an atmosphere of lighthearted liberty, but I don’t see this as a likely outcome, not in a state of make-believe cowboys.

This new legal principle of the fundamental right of the young to a promising future needs to be taken up by Congress, not the courts, and Congress is in the greasy grip of geezers, thus Medicare runs the country into bankruptcy lavishing premier care on the shaky and semi-alert while kids in poverty can’t get their cavities filled.

A country that invests so heavily in the sunset and leaves the young to debt and despair is looking in the wrong direction. I have a great-niece who is the most focused and cheerful and ambitious person I know, heading for a career in architecture while raising a family. She’s the future: when energy-efficient houses become the norm, she’ll be designing them. She’s adopted, Chinese, raised by Swedes, so she covers the bases. She’s funny. When I moved out of Minnesota, she and her man came and hauled away a couple roomfuls of furniture for their new house in St. Paul, bought with the help of a public subsidy. She has a little girl who’s learning Chinese, Spanish, and this language right here.

That child and my daughter and my grandson are now the focus of my politics: what’s good for them is right for the country. I admit that I’m leaning toward higher taxation, just because there’s so much treasure in so few soft manicured hands. Rob the bloated and revive the bony. I’m old and in the way and my ill-education and shame and wasted years are nobody’s problem but mine. The world owes me nothing. I want to see young Democrats make a national name for themselves by going after the plutocracy hammer and tong and not leave the job to Joe. We’ve got a great country, people, let’s be worthy of it.

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One good reason to travel around America is to meet American people, all the more so if you’re one of them yourself. I went out West for ten days and rediscovered what I always knew, that our people don’t mind talking about themselves. You call a cab at 5 a.m. in Flagstaff and a cheerful guy pulls up at your hotel and you ask him how his day is going — “Fine,” he says, “I’m on the midnight shift and I love to see the sun come up.”

“You from here?” No, he’s from Boston, he came out here to help his son who owns the cab company, and he loves Arizona, the climate relieves his arthritis. “So what did you do back in Boston?”

In Europe, this question might raise hackles, like asking, “What’s your annual income?” but he doesn’t mind. He’s a retired Baptist minister. And now the door opens wide — you’ve got yourself a good conversation all the way to the airport.

He asked if I had come out to see the Grand Canyon. Yes, indeed. The day before, I got up at 5 a.m. and hiked over to the South Rim and stood in the dark in the midst of strangers as the eastern sky lightened and it was like church except no singing and no handshakes. The light dawns and Creation appears, six million years of rock, the mighty Colorado below, the underlying beauty of our little planet home, the silent fellow tourists around us, whispers of German and Swedish and Japanese, the canyon walls turning reddish orange, and you stand gazing down for an hour or two and I resolved to give up regret, which is merely self-pity, and to embrace what is true, namely love and kindness, the vocation of cheerfulness, the dedication to the day, this day, each hour. And then I went to the café in the Bright Angel Lodge and had oatmeal and coffee.

A man stopped at my table who recognized me from my radio days. “Have a seat,” I said. He’s from Ohio, retired high school English teacher. Like everyone my age, he’s worried about young people. “They’re so busy with sports and activities and social media and video games and whatnot, it got so I couldn’t assign reading, they just didn’t have time for it.”

“We were lucky to be born when we were,” I say. We had the advantage of boredom, which led us to become readers. And we launched into memories of our long-ago youth.

I came back to New York Saturday and Sunday morning in church, we sang, “When from bondage we are summoned out of darkness into light, we must go on hope and patience, walk by faith and not by sight,” and the next phrase, “Let us throw off all that hinders” struck home because we’ve cleaned out boxes of stuff recently, including a disaster of a novel I was glad to see disappear, and the next verse about Jesus leading us by the hand through a barren desert, reminded me of standing at sunrise looking down into the Canyon.

I didn’t go there to study geology. What I know about rock formations you could put in a grasshopper’s left nostril. Like the people around me, I was there to be with the Lord. I felt in bondage to the past, a common phenomenon when you have so much of it, bondage to Midwestern irony, a dryness, a refusal of joy. Or maybe it comes from my evangelical upbringing, a separatist tendency, an aloofness, the elitism of the redeemed and enlightened, which leads naturally to a sort of brittle satire. You look at the morning paper and all of your biases come to attention.

A person needs to break through this armor. I see the refugee kids from Ecuador selling candy on the subway platforms in midtown Manhattan and the heart absolutely breaks. Families have fled to America for simple survival and it’s more than New York can handle but New York still opens its heart to them. I see the videos on Facebook of my Vietnamese great-nieces in Ho Chi Minh City and the armor cracks. I stand in the dawn of Creation and am overwhelmed. Life is good, praise the Lord, but a criminal billionaire has exploited the resentments of millions and is out to destroy the republic. This must not happen, people. It simply must not.

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