Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 23

Moving out of Minnesota and moving some of the furniture to a New York apartment has given my love and me a fine appreciation of movers, and we believe we got the best but who knows, maybe they’re all this good. Sinewy young men with strong backs and good manners and a keen eye who can angle an upright bedstead to fit in a freight elevator with inches to spare and coax it through a doorway — “Got it?” one says, “Got it” says the other — and into a short hall and then maneuver it partway into one bedroom so as to get the angle into the destination bedroom, and afterward they stand and admire their work. “I didn’t think we’d get that sucker in here,” says one and the other agrees.

I am no part of this. I’m sitting in the kitchen because no furniture is coming in here. I’m staring at my laptop. They can see that I am of the dilettante class and they are of the class that gets the job done. Also I am old and teeter so they don’t want my help, thanks very much. You’re bringing in a sofa and suddenly you’ve got a cardiac situation on your hands.

No, these guys are working for my wife; I’m out of the picture. She worries over them, exclaims in wonderment at their finesse, laughs at their jokes, and when the job is done, she presses big bills into their hands.

This was the fourth time in one week that I was struck by competence. I met some EMTs on Long Island who attended to me after I had a seizure onstage and stood blank-faced for a couple of minutes. They were cool and asked questions and after ten minutes I remembered what I had blanked on.

I saw a waiter in the dining car of the westbound Southwest Chief carry a tray of water glasses past our table as the car lurched and swayed as if an earthquake had hit Kansas and he swayed with it, no problem. He looked at me, he said, “We have magnets on our shoes.”

Got to Arizona where the Grand Canyon runs a railway line for us tourists and a cowgirl with long blond hair and guitar came in the Vista-Dome car and sang for us Kate Wolf’s “Across the Great Divide” and Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country,” a summer job for her, likely minimum-wage, but she sang them from the heart so kindly, I was moved.

I’ve come across receptionists who made it clear they hated their jobs and others who were receptive. Waiters who wished they were elsewhere, waiters who enjoyed the back and forth. I was on the phone with a woman at one of those reservation agencies that plays robotic music on Hold but there she was, smart, precise, friendly, and I wanted to say, “Of the hundreds of anonymous telephone people I’ve dealt with lately, you really stand out in the crowd, kid,” but I was afraid it’d sound condescending, so I didn’t.

The world gets smaller as you grow old and lose your ambition to conquer and capture and you notice what’s in your immediate vicinity more than you did before. We are surrounded by good workers, most of whom we are hardly aware of. The garbage is collected, some of it is recycled, a high level of decorum is maintained, the trains run in a timely manner. I rode the train out of Chicago, passing a mile-long freight train of containers on flatbeds, the supply line for the city. I have friends who’ve been hit hard by dreadful circumstances but each of them has competent people at work in their behalf. A brain aneurysm here, Alzheimer’s there, a hoarding compulsion, the death of a husband.

The press, of course, is fascinated by stories and the best ones are about crime, disaster, downfall, and the steady march of a museum-quality conman to corrupt our country, but the reality is that we’re a civil society thanks to the good workers around us. Young people face the challenge young people of all time have faced: Be Good at Something, Make Yourself Useful. My dad was a carpenter and how I wound up in the amusement business is anybody’s guess but the night I turned 81 I did a hilarious two hours of stand-up and everyone laughed hard, including a woman 34 weeks pregnant and she went to the hospital and the child was born safely. Score an assist for the old man.

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The beauty of this blessed summer is our chance to escape the news and devote ourselves to real life. I sat with my love on a hotel balcony overlooking a marina and we renewed our vow to never own a boat. I got up at 5 a.m. to send a niece to the airport and I gave her several coherent sentences of advice, drawing on my own mistakes. My love and I sat in the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station and devoured a dozen Malpeques and a lobster roll and scrod, the lights in the domed ceiling unchanged from when I saw it with my dad in 1953. In the subway heading home, she showed me snapshots of another niece holding her baby boy to her breast, minutes after delivery. The mother looked exhilarated, the babe surprised, the papa stunned. We couldn’t stop studying the pictures, the delight of them, which obliterated so much nonsense, the naked lie about the stolen election, the “weaponization” of law enforcement, the banning of books. We were back in the real America.

I wish they’d ban my book Cheerfulness so that more people would read it. I wrote it because the America I know and love is upbeat, enterprising, amiable to a fault, partial to jokes, and the mood of fracture and trauma seems fictitious to me, a far cry from the country that attracted our immigrant forebears. They didn’t cross the border in the hopes of taking vengeance.

Friday afternoon, I boarded the Lake Shore Limited in New York, bound for Chicago and then the Grand Canyon, along with my Londoner stepdaughter and her husband who are ambitious hikers and eager to experience one of nature’s great erosion projects. We chugged through tunnels under Manhattan and then emerged along the mighty Hudson, on our way to Schenectady and Syracuse, and along Lake Michigan through Ohio and Indiana, not far from the route my ancestors David and Martha Ann Powell traveled 150 years ago with a milk cow tied to a wagonload of babies, including my great-grandpa James Wesley. David was infected with the westward urge.

I have no such urge myself and never did. It’s been an accidental life, a twig floating in the stream of life, like the driverless car that Google is developing but one programmed to be directed by gusts of wind.

I love trains. The food was bad but the conversation was good. Something about motion stimulates talk. I come from people of few words; they should’ve gotten on bicycles, it would’ve loosened them up. The train stopped for maintenance problems, then hit top speed to make up the time, so it was a rough ride, a lot of bucketa-bucketa, which stimulated a wild night of interesting dreams: I was in Reykjavik singing in Icelandic, I spoke with my mother who said she loved me, I was in a dinghy with a sail heading up the river to meet my love, I won the Nobel Prize in literature, I fell into a pit of manure but kept my mouth shut, I was sitting in a city room of a newspaper typing on a Royal typewriter and using carbon paper.

I lay awake through Indiana, thinking about my grandfather James, a skilled carpenter who loved books and loved to sing. My dad built our house from the basement to the roof beam. Now I’m eight years older than my grandpa and seven years younger than my father.

So much of the world feels alien to the 81-year-old, which relieves me of personal responsibility; I’m a citizen of a country that is disappearing. So be it. My responsibility is to pay attention. I sat in the dining car drinking coffee as we cruised into Chicago and a Mennonite couple sat down, she in a black gown, he wearing a flat-brimmed straw hat. We spoke and I told the joke about the waitress who came to the Lord after she waited on several men a night. They laughed politely. He said, “Thank you for cleaning that up. Usually it’s a prostitute.”

I hesitate to say this because it’s something my people never said, never dreamed of saying, maybe it felt like bad luck to their cautious Scots souls, but Chicago is approaching and I need to pack my bag, so here it is: these are the days, the time is now; I have never felt so happy as I do now. This will change. But I accept this beautiful summer, happiness is dominant, it diminishes all the miscellaneous.

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I clean up nicely and if I dress up I could pass for an ophthalmologist or at least an ornithologist and I try to walk briskly around New York and maintain a cheerful demeanor but I notice people are holding doors open for me and sometimes they look concerned, watching me descend two flights into the subway station. Evidently I look unsteady.

I’m only being careful. My days of taking a down staircase two stairs at a time no-handed are in the past along with my tennis game, but I am happier than ever and Monday night, my 81st birthday, I did a two-hour show up in Connecticut with my daughter, 25, sitting in the wings and a niece, profoundly pregnant, in the audience, and it was good. I walked back and forth on stage and Rob the piano player and I did a string of limericks and sonnets (sung) and I told funny stories about funerals and I even ventured into ribaldry.

My daughter is a joker. We meet and she says, “Make me laugh,” which I can do by scratching the bottom of her bare foot with my fingernails or by telling the joke about the two penguins on the ice floe. She didn’t inherit her sense of humor from me. I was brought up Brethren and fed on Old Testament prophets and the Book of Revelation; I had to work to acquire a sense of humor and it didn’t fully bloom until old age.

So I sang a song I would never have sung on the radio in which a man is lying with his dog and a sheep and the dog barks at a magpie in the tree overhead, the magpie shrieks, the sheep bites the man’s privates, and the magpie defecates. A bold artistic decision for a man brought up in a decent home with antimacassars and a plaque over the breakfast table, “Whatsoever things are pure, meditate on these things.” But my parents are gone to their reward, and I did it, and the audience was delighted. (The auditorium was pitch-dark, which permits people to laugh at things they wouldn’t want other people to see that they enjoy.) Delight is delight. I love that explosive laughter. My audience is mature and they don’t explode easily.

My daughter didn’t laugh, she smiled. She was there in an official daughterly capacity, observing, having spent childhood backstage at my shows, and she was professionally pleased at the success of the joke: one more point for Dad. With her, we skipped over the Old Testament prophets and went straight to “Love one another even as I have loved you.” I don’t believe she is aware of everlasting unbearable torment in the flames of hell. Boredom, grief, loneliness, yes; torment, no.

It was two hours of intense stand-up swerving through amusing irrelevancies and improvised digressions into childhood memories off the top of the old man’s head, the subject changing like flashing lights, Grandma Dora, a poem about horses, my adored beloved, sweet corn, whispered secrets, sudden revelations, embarrassments recollected: I do a pretty good impression of an old man thinking aloud, possibly demented, or not, but who cares? It made me so happy to be so lucky to do this.

My father at 81 enjoyed his children and relations more than ever, and my father-in-law Ray Nilsson was still chopping firewood and enjoying listening to Schubert and climbing up on his cabin roof to clean the gutters at 81. My grandfather James Keillor died young at 73, having worked hard at farming, but there’s a picture of him, old and grizzled, bundled up on a bitter cold day, looking very happy to be forking hay down to the livestock. Dora had a bowl of bread dough rising in the kitchen and was busy vacuuming when she dropped unconscious from the stroke at 84. So I carry on an old tradition.

I doubt that delight can be taught. The basic stuff such as Please and Thank you and Taking turns, yes, and Sticking with a job until it’s done and Not staying out too late, that nothing good happens after 1 a.m. So to arrive at this advanced age, after a long busy career and the stress of dreadful mistakes, and look into the wings and see my daughter studying me in a mood of delight makes me wildly lucky. My people cautioned me against wild unrealistic expectations and their caution makes this night sort of fabulous. Thanks, people. And now on we go to 82.

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I took a ferry out of New London to the far end of Long Island, the end that is not Brooklyn, this week, which is a big deal for a Midwesterner, the ocean breeze, the big bass honk of the ship’s horn, the expanse of the Sound. It was an easy choice between that and four hours on the Long Island Expressway. I am done with freeways insofar as possible.

My late brother Philip grew up in Minnesota, same as I, but he came to love the sea by reading Horatio Hornblower novels, and after he took a wrong turn into corporate life in a suit and tie, he got straightened out and took a job studying shoreline erosion and thermal pollution on Lake Michigan, much of the time aboard a boat, wearing a windbreaker. He never regretted leaving the office cubicle.

I don’t share his love of the sea and ships. I’m leery of the Sound after reading a story about sharks attacking swimmers. I don’t want my obituary to refer to my having been eaten by a fish. I prefer to die in a dim room, sedated, while telling the joke about the couple killed in a crash who arrive in heaven and find a beautiful golf course where the man tees up and hits a hole-in-one and turns to his wife and says, “If you hadn’t made me stop smoking, I could’ve been here years ago.”

The ferry landed at Orient Point and I headed to the town of Riverhead to do a stand-up show, still out on the road a week before my 81st birthday. I dread the prospect of retirement, which in so many cases leads to disintegration and dementia. I intend to go on performing until I reach the age of 98, beating my mother by one year, and I die after a wonderful evening singing and telling stories, shot by an envious rival.

I used to be a writer, wrote stories, novels, sonnets, then limericks, but I don’t know many happy writers over the age of 70. Writers tend to agonize, feeling that suffering is essential to literary eminence: this is a romantic view of literature, the tortured artist making something beautiful out of pain. Not I. I wrote because I like being alone and writing is the perfect excuse. But then I acquired an audience and once you do, you never look back.

I was the invisible middle child in a big family: there were the older responsible two and the young attractive three and then there was me, the glum misfit, and to find myself, an old man, standing in the wings of a theater, about to stride out on stage to applause and launch into comedy is pure pleasure, so much more so than golf or cribbage or whatever other old men do.

I love my work. I’m like the engineer who was sentenced to die at the guillotine but the blade wouldn’t drop so they were about to sentence him to prison instead but he looked up from where he lay and said, “No. Wait. Hand me a pair of pliers. I see where the problem is.” And he fixed it so he could be executed. Fixing was his line of work.

Comedians die too, of course, and the day will come. My audience is getting younger. I see people in the crowd who have only a slight memory of the 20th century. If I mention Richard Nixon, they look confused so I don’t. I don’t know what TikTok is or vogueing or pickleball. Irrelevance is on the horizon.
Someday the joke will be on me but not quite yet, God willing.

I did the show at Riverhead, had a touch of aphasia at the end, stood speechless, blank-faced for a minute and a half, and the audience looked concerned and then I recovered a few words and staggered to a conclusion and we sang “Auld Lang Syne” and I exited to find four EMT guys in the wings who’d been called by the stage manager. They put me on a gurney and wheeled me away and a few minutes later I recalled the stuff I had blocked on, or aphased, and was hauled to hospital and scanned, tapped, tested (“Follow my finger with your eyes.”), and found to be functional.

Unfortunate, I guess, but how will we find out about EMTs if there is no E? There are excellent people out there whose mission is to pick up the fallen. Thank God. And now that I know this, I don’t need to aphase again.

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I am obligated to be an optimist because I’ve had a lucky life — I had a big career in a field for which I had no aptitude, my heart got surgically repaired, I married well on the third try — so it’d be dishonest to sing about the water tasting like turpentine and wanting to lay my head on the railroad line so the 4:19 can ease my troubled mind, so I don’t, I sing Van Morrison’s “These Are the Days of the Endless Summer,” but I respect skeptics and I’m glad that investigative journalism is at work shedding light on dark corners.

Take the recent piece in the Times about the NRA’s transformation from an organization of sportsmen to a powerhouse lobby that ruled Congress and expanded the Second Amendment so that we now have 400 million guns in the country and mass killings are a routine matter that has poisoned urban life. You read the piece with disgust at the machinations of politicians, and then you set it aside and enjoy the day. I got to ride the Keystone Express out to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and do a show at which I sang, with my friends Heather and Christine, Jerry Garcia’s “Attics of My Life” and Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl” and the audience joined in on the “Sha la la la la la la la la la la la de da,” which we repeated several times until we got the correct number of las. You cannot allow the existence of evil to overshadow the beauty of life in this splendiferous world we walk around in.

Pennsylvania: you have to love a state with towns named Blue Bell, King of Prussia, Wissahickon, Mount Airy, Flourtown, Conshohocken, West Conshohocken, Swedeland, Schnecksville, Lumberville, Plowville, Normal Square, Jim Thorpe, Mount Joy. The map of Pennsylvania is a testament to individuality. The developers of suburbia prefer generic names, such as Riverside and Lawnview but the Keystone State is a land of proud originality.

Not far from where we sang, we saw Amish boys and girls in solemn traditional garb playing volleyball and whooping and laughing and this, rather than the latest shooting, is the real news, the happy persistence of independence and the acceptance of it by the neighbors. The Amish set up tents in cornfields and offer dinner to the tourists, fried chicken and corn on the cob, and I hear that it’s very amiable and the corn is fresh off the stalk and fairly fabulous.

Acceptance is a natural phenomenon. It’s happened with gay couples and it’s happening with people named Samuel who now want to be called Sarah and with Ellens who now identify as Allens. I grew up in a very white community and I am still quite aware of race but I think younger people are much less aware, having grown up with so many shades of skin. It’s a natural process of familiarity.

The media are naturally attracted to despair, death, destruction, division, danger, because they make for a good story. “Hamlet” wouldn’t be a classic if Hamlet and Claudius and Gertrude sat in a circle and worked out their differences: you really need Polonius to be stabbed and Ophelia to drown and Laertes to seek revenge and the big sword duel and the poisoned goblet. But journalists go to ridiculous ends at times: for example, a story in the Washington Post about why it’s so dangerous to fall off a cruise ship while at sea. Something, the story admits, that is extremely rare, there being railings and all, but the reporter makes a great deal out of precious little.

I’m 80 and it’s clear to me that ordinary life in America has progressed rather majestically. When I unload the dishwasher and put laundry into the washer as our cleaning lady Lulu vacuums around me, I think of my grandma on the farm, a smart woman and a progressive, and what she might’ve done had she had some appliances and bought chicken at a supermarket instead of chasing it down and hacking its head off and defeathering it and frying it over a woodfire.

Grandma said, “I’ve lived through the best, most exciting time in human history. My life started with covered wagons, and it has gone through jet airplanes and television.” She never drove a car, she drove horses because they knew the way home, but freed of dishwashing and laundry and cleaning, I think she might’ve sat down and done what I’m doing now, writing something in gratitude for life’s blessings. Thanks for everything, great and small. We’re lucky.

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A team of four men and one woman is on a mission to fix the 21st century and bring it more in line with the 18th and who can argue with the Supremes and who knows what the Ghost of Originalism may tell them to do next? At the moment, federal law prohibits destroying or tampering with restroom smoke detectors on airliners, a curtailment of individual liberty we’ve all come to accept but do the Supremes, riding around as they do aboard private jets owned by wealthy chums? We don’t know. Will small children’s right to work 12-hour days in factories be restored to them? Will the right of Lutherans to carry concealed weapons to the 11 a.m. service be upheld? You tell me.

I do believe that there is a Higher Law than what the Supremes declare and that a person is obliged to think Highly rather than Supremely, and one could argue that the right to Survival trumps (pardon my language) the Mind of Justice Alito, and as we look around and see petroleum and plastics degrading the planet, we might decide that the supremely wealthy who placed the five on the Court and who profit from pollution are thereby outlaws and the crime is giving their fortunes preeminence over humanity. What to do?

Well, environmentalists are not about to storm the Court the way the MAGA crowd stormed the Capitol. Environmentalists are gentle souls, birdwatchers, gardeners, armed only with laptops and they have no experience at storming, so they’d have to work hard going door to door for a year to elect a Congress and president who’d expand the Court to a more reasonable size for a nation of 330 million — say, a Court of 36 instead of 9.

And then I remember what Mark Twain said: “To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.” Showing others how to be good is the privilege of a person who is days away from turning 81. Go fight the good fight, my children, and I will donate $25 to your cause and otherwise I plan to spend my days in pure pleasure, sitting on the porch, writing limericks, drinking ginger tea, playing Scrabble with my wife and putting down words like NAKED and AMATORY.

Fighting evil is noble but in my old age I’ve come to feel that cheerfulness, gratitude, comedy are the essence of life, and so I look forward to the imminent arrival of my English relatives who love this country so sweetly. They are hikers and in America there’s more to hike. For me the visit is a vacation from listening to people bemoan Mr. Mar-a-Lugubrious and despair about what they read in the morning paper. My Brits can talk your ear off about the depredations of the Tories and they look on the monarchy as a malignancy but they love America in all its splendor, and so I’m taking them to visit Grand Canyon and gaze at geology and descend the Bright Angel Trail into the depth and then learn a great lesson — it is harder descending and easier coming up — which may be applicable in life generally — and we won’t be flying to Arizona, we’ll take the train out of New York and up the Hudson and over to Chicago so they can see the splendor of Ohio and Indiana, and then the Southwest Chief for the splendor of Missouri and Kansas. Most Americans would prefer to fly over Kansas. My Brits will be awestruck at the prairie, the little frame houses on the vast flatness.

I myself am a secret monarchist, as were my relatives in Rhode Island and Connecticut in 1775 except they weren’t secret about it. I miss Elizabeth II, the perfect modest model of a modern English monarch, tramping in the rain with her corgis. When Her Majesty met President Schlump and he opened his big yap and hee-hawed at her, we saw a contrast that was not favorable to our side.

We’ll be gone a week looking at America and I will read no news during that week. It’s hard, what with bulletins beeping on my phone, but I can do it. If Justice Thomas throws out the indictments of the Trumpkin, I won’t know about it. I’ll be looking at this magnificent country. When Thomas Keillor left Yorkshire and came here, he knew what he was doing, even if he wasn’t aware of it.

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I’ve heard enough about Barbie and Oppenheimer and Ron DeSantis, so let’s talk about me for a minute. I’m barefoot, wearing tan pants and black T, sitting under a potted maple on a terrace in Manhattan in a perfect summer twilight, an old man with a teenage heart, and I’ve been duly humble long enough but now I’d like a little attention and I’m sorry that the Florida Orange gave narcissism a bad name. In Minnesota, when I was a kid, we considered selfishness unseemly but what did I get for all my selflessness? Well, today is a new day and as of today I am a New Yorker. Today I bought a knish dog and a cream soda at a sidewalk stand. In Minnesota, we call it a pig in a blanket, but I’m a New Yorker now and I use the word knish. Okay? Got a problem with that?

When I moved out of Minneapolis, I sorted through personal papers and it struck me that, in hundreds of pictures of me, I am not smiling in a single one. I look like a mortician with a migraine. Partly this is due to the cold. Winter is brutal and you keep your mouth shut so you won’t frost your lungs. Teachers told me that. Plus which, in Minnesota there never were many people around so what was the point of exercising personal charm? Plus which, there are strong Lutheran tendencies there, people consider humor frivolous, maybe sacrilegious. Jesus wept; He didn’t laugh.

I feel much freer in New York. I sometimes talk to myself when walking in the park, assuming I have something interesting to say. If you did this in Minnesota, there would be an intervention, you’d go into rehab for self-consciousness training. In New York, people enjoy this. It’s a looser culture. Crosswalks are ignored and “Do Not Walk” signs are considered only a suggestion.

I feel much freer of guilt in New York. In Minnesota, guilt is a civic duty, and shaming is a popular sport. I’ve never been in a group of Minnesotans for ten minutes without someone bringing up racism, sexism, injustice, the oppression of someone or other, our shameful treatment of 80-year-olds, the unfairness of this, that or the other thing, and everyone is obliged to be solemn and nod and feel contrition. Ten minutes! Knee-jerk contrition. I’m done with it.

I turn 81 in a few days and I intend to spend my remaining time looking at beautiful things, starting with my wife, and enjoying music and comedy and theater and the writing of writers who make me happy. It isn’t what they taught me at the University of Minnesota. They hung T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” around my neck and other grim classics that taught us that the greatest literature is the suicide note.

The U also taught me that America is in ten different crises, probably insoluble, but one must fight for what’s right, however hopeless it be. Well, I do what I can. I save gallons of water every day by peeing in the shower. I recycle with a passion. I wrote a novel, Lake Wobegon Virus, that nobody liked so I sent my 200 copies off to be recycled — what other author has done such a thing? Name one. I squeeze the last toothpaste out of the tube with a pair of needle-nose pliers. I buy milk and OJ in paper cartons.

But now that I’m in New York, I plan to avoid activists and hang out with funny people. The 80s are the homestretch. Mortality makes each day a fine treasure, meant to be savored, so that’s my project now, and New York is the right place: in Minnesota thousands of Swedes worry about diversity and inclusivity, and in New York it’s all around you and you’re part of it. I paid my dues, I was a liberal Democrat, and now I plan to liberate myself from liberalism and be a happy bystander at the parade and cheer for the drummers, the dames in the glittery capes, the guy playing the calliope.

Wake up, America. We have the great privilege of speaking English, a language with so many words for hogwash, such as hokum and hooey and horse hockey, plus bilge and balloon juice, also piffle and pomposity, with which we can fend off claptrap and twaddle. Come up and see me sometime and we’ll have a heart-to-heart.

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Moving out of an apartment as I’ve been doing recently convinces me at last to resign from American consumer culture and live with only bedding, one towel, two changes of clothing, a pair of shoes, and one suit to wear for shows and also to be buried in. Stationery, stamps, and a couple pens. I own 21 coffee cups; I only need one. Nothing plastic, thank you. I will still fly Delta but I’ll lose 25 pounds to lessen the load.

The pleasure of moving is the excavation of the past. I open a box and here’s a photo of my fifth-grade class, the eager neatly-combed-and-dressed boy with glasses sitting behind John Poate is me. I am still that eager boy, heavier but anxious to do well. There is a letter from a fan of my radio show, “Every Saturday at 5 p.m., everything else ceased and we gathered around the radio.” Also, in a brown envelope, eight color photographs of my innards taken by the surgical team that installed a pig valve in my heart: the valve is pale pink, the innards are dark red. And there is a letter from a beloved aunt in 1995, reproaching me for traveling to Rome with my fiancée, engaging no doubt in premarital sex, embarking on a path of philandering and adultery, for which there would be no forgiveness. It’s a powerful articulate letter and I admire her for writing it, which she did out of love.

Four artifacts of a long life. The boy eager to do well and please his grandma and aunts. The radio guy who amused himself for two hours every Saturday and was (and is) astonished to encounter people who listened to it. The recipient of a heart valve procedure to fix a hereditary defect that killed off several relatives in their late 50s. And the Sanctified Brethren boy, brought up on literal interpretation of Scripture, except we did have automobiles and went to doctors and attended public schools along with the unsaved.

I kept all these and other souvenirs. I never listened to the show myself and I have no memorabilia from it. It would only give me remorse that the show wasn’t better than it was. John Updike told me once that he rather enjoyed reading his early work but then he was a naturally cheerful man, rare for an author. Critics resented him for that and gave him grudging reviews; they preferred writers who had suffered, been imprisoned, exiled, or at least had abusive fathers. John was too American. There wasn’t much Russian or Spanish about him. He wrote because he was good at it and he knew it.

And now in my old age I’ve found useful work as a stand-up cheerleader for adult cheerfulness, the basic goodness of life, a counter-voice to the diversity cops and agony aunts who’ve taken over publishing, journalism, public radio and TV, and much of academia. DeSantis’s anti-woke campaign is stupidity on toast; the real problem with MacWoke is its penchant for dismal pessimism, its humorlessness. I grew up with fundamentalists who looked forward to the end of the world and now progressives do too.

I remember academia well, the layers of interlocking committees, the somber seriousness, the unquestioning reverence, the deadliness of official prose that got absorbed in people’s bloodstream and made them mummies, and I remember the liberation of leaving it in 1969 for a fledgling upstart radio station with one manager who was my age, 27, and thus my life was changed, all of which makes me suspicious of officialese, whether lefty or rightist. My aunt’s note about damnation was authentic, written from the heart, in her loving voice. The boy is eager to answer the questions correctly but also to write a book report that makes Mrs. Moehlenbrock laugh. The fan letter is mystifying: the thought of strangers who are friends, which is the basis of the business I’m in. The heart, open to the surgeon’s knife, tells me how fortunate I am to be alive. The procedure was not available to my elders who suffered from the same defect.

I pack them back in a box and leave it for the movers and I walk out the door, never to return, and head for the airport, looking forward to new confusions, life having been clarified, especially the aspect of good fortune. Every day I wake up and feel Wilbur’s valve operating is a very good day. As Charlotte told him, “You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing.”

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Clearing out an apartment a man sees what a work of art domestic life is, and clearance demands an iron will, no shilly-shallying, no regrets. Hundreds of books must go. The painting of the blizzard must go; I bought it long ago because it reminded me of Minnesota mornings and walking to school, and now she informs me that it gives her the heebie-jeebies, and because I am in love with this woman I offer it up as a sacrifice. This impresses her and so she allows me to keep the stone busts of Mark Twain and Erato the Muse of lyrical poetry. Horse-trading. I keep the bust of Lincoln because it reminds me of my father.

I keep mementos of family and teachers. Now and then young progressive Democrats have said to me, when I expressed an opinion, “Well, you’re a privileged white male,” and of course they’re right. In first grade, Mrs. Estelle Shaver kept me after school to read aloud to her and one day the janitor walked in and she said, “Listen to him, Bill. Doesn’t he have a wonderful voice. I love to listen to him while I grade lessons.” It was remedial reading, of course, but she made me believe I’d been chosen for this privilege and she changed my life. In fourth grade I was leery of playground bullies, and Mrs. Fern Moehlenbrock let me spend recess in the library. She knew I loved to read. To know at the age of 10 what you love is a privilege.

Honors were bestowed on me in my professional life that might impress you but they were minor annoyances compared to the blessings of good teachers.

The young Democrats are nursing their resentments in behalf of the underprivileged, a noble though harmless exercise, and I am an old Democrat who allows himself to be grateful. It’s a beautiful summer, the new valve in my heart is working, my wife is happy, I’m trucking around doing shows, and people tell me jokes: Ron DeSantis is struggling politically because he keeps having Disney spells.

Politics is uglier than ever before. Politicians refer to an “invasion” of Hispanic migrants across the southern border and then a man, using the word “invasion,” killed 23 in a Walmart in El Paso. A former president’s website offered up the Obamas’ home address and a gentleman read it and announced that he was going to try to get “a shot” and the Secret Service arrested him near the home, carrying two guns and 400 rounds of ammunition.

It’s hard to imagine Bob Dole doing that to Bill Clinton. Respect for the rival is taught to children in games; you line up afterward and give a fist bump to the opponents who were in your face minutes before. I admire my competitor Taylor Swift, a dedicated professional and a generous soul. I don’t do costume changes in my show, I just stroll out on stage and sing a prayer and sing about fading daffodils and the brevity of summer and “This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, to love that well which thou must leave ere long” and the crowd and I sing “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty,” which they probably haven’t sung since the sixth grade, and we do the one about deer and antelope, and maybe the Doxology, and while Taylor gives hope and affirmation to the anguished young, I assure the aging that they’re heading in the right direction. Past 70 there is a tremendous diminishment of B.S. around you. And your sins diminish: your greed is satisfied at any ATM, your lust is for more sleep, your gluttony is for a Dairy Queen Blizzard, your sloth becomes meditation.

I’m an English major, an education that prepared me for a career in valet parking, but instead I go around and allow the curious to see a grateful old man. My people invaded from Yorkshire and Wales, and we’ve done well here, thanks to good teachers and our elders who taught us gratitude. Life itself is a privilege: look around you and be grateful for the trees, the grass, Lincoln, Twain, even the snow falling in the painting, and thanks to the good people who took it off my hands. I’m in the deletion business: I’ve eliminated running, TV (except for baseball), and I gave away my unread Moby-Dick. Not enough time. I hear that Ahab dies and Ishmael survives to tell the tale. Good enough. Time for a walk.

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People sometimes inquire why a man of 80 keeps doing shows and I got the answer last week in the hills of Virginia, an outdoor show near Lexington, a perfect summer night after a morning downpour, an amiable crowd, Robin and Linda Williams came over from Staunton to sing with me, I talked about Lake Wobegon where there’s now a veterinary aromatherapist and people are selling artisanal ice from Lake Superior. I talked about it as a museum-quality guy who saw most of the precious century and remembers cursive writing and lightbulb jokes, and the audience stood during intermission and sang “Going to the Chapel” and “In My Life” and “America” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” — in Virginia! they knew the words about the watchfires in the circling camps, the evening dews and damps, the dim and flaring lamps. A crowd singing in harmony after sunset: it was gorgeous.

I hung out with the customers before and after (there’s no backstage at this amphitheater so I entered and exited through the audience) and it’s startling to hear middle-aged people tell me they listened to “Prairie Home” as kids, grew up with Guy Noir and Dusty and Lefty, I was sort of a distant uncle to them. I was very busy those years, hosting the show, writing it, touring around, and I was an ambitious author. My hard drive is full of the rusted wreckage of unfinished novels and stories and screenplays. I was not paying attention to the radio audience, it was only a statistic and I didn’t really believe it. And now here were the statistics shaking my hand. I stood next to them while they took a picture of the two of us.

They know all about me so I get them to talk about themselves and here’s a biochemistry professor and a young woman EMT who wants to be a doctor, a Robert Frost scholar, a Lutheran minister, a data analyst, a man who quarries limestone, a harpist who’s working as a waitress. I’m an old familiar voice to them, they’re all fresh and new to me, and every one has a story.

The radio show was a variety show, musical acts with comedy woven through it, the saga of the Little Town That Time Forgot, commercials for coffee and biscuits and the Federated Association of Organizations and rhubarb pie and the Professional Organization of English Majors, and in writing it all those years, a person never deals with the moral question, “Is this weekly two hours doing some good in the world that justifies people wasting time listening to it? Or is it simply a distraction?”

These people who cluster around me are trying to answer that question for me, which is generous of them, but I’m afraid there’s no answer, we’re all struggling to be worthwhile, I open up my laptop and see the shipwrecks, I come away from a show and I hope that the crew felt it was worth their effort, the sound guy, the operations manager, the road manager Sam Hudson, the ushers, the beer vendors, and that the crowd drives home feeling good.

I do know that there were beautiful moments. I talked about the Fourth in Lake Wobegon and the Living Flag and I sang, “O say can you see” and the crowd stood and sang the national anthem a cappella and it was in a good key, not too high, and they sang with impressive power. Their rendition of “When peace like a river attendeth my way and sorrows like sea billows roll” was so good it made you weep. And Robin and Linda’s “In the Green Summertime.” And at the end, as we were singing “I Bid You Goodnight” I stepped off the stage and lost my balance and fell into the arms of a man in the front row (gasp) and he caught me and then I hugged him and the singing continued.

So the show goes on. I’m not nostalgic about those Saturday nights going back to 1974. It’s okay that the people I met at Lexington are sentimental, but I acquired a critical eye from my evangelical family and my teachers and editors along the way, and also from my wife, Jenny, and I want these road shows to touch people and send them away happy. I stand in the back of the crowd and open the show with a sung prayer and walk through the crowd singing lines from Herrick, Marlowe, Emily D., Yeats, Blake, Shakespeare, Van Morrison (“These are the days of the endless summer”). These are evil times. I want to make light.

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