Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 24

Last week was a good one, especially Wednesday, a wild ride in a cab through mid-Manhattan, threading through backed-up traffic, cutting across lanes and into narrow corridors to the Moynihan Train Hall leaving no casualties behind, and I marched into the train station and made a historic decision: I was pulling a big suitcase and a small one and carrying a cup of coffee and looking around for the Departures board, but I saw a sign Red Cap and an arrow and I followed the arrow.

I’ve never done this before. I’m 80, close to 81. I’ve never before asked someone to carry my baggage —I’m a Democrat and the idea of baggage assistance reeks of privilege, not to mention unmanliness, but the cup of hot coffee was the persuader, the dread of spillage, the sympathetic looks from other passengers (“I hope I don’t get that way when I’m that old”), and I exchanged glances with a uniformed Red Cap with a badge that said “Cliff” and I let him pile my bags on a towering load on his dolly and he led me down to Track 10 and I felt like Cary Grant. It was very elegant. He loaded me aboard the Silver Star, I tipped him generously and he thanked me. It was a profound moment: a man of 80 accepting his own eightiness.

Accepting help: this is my new policy. I’ve been resisting assistance long enough, thinking it is offensive to my masculinity, but manhood is not really my concern. My young wife is an independent feminist and tries to conceal her affection by issuing curt suggestions in an authoritative tone, but when she sits in my lap, I can feel her heart rate increase dramatically. So I can now afford to walk down the train platform behind Cliff to preboard the Silver Star.

We pull out of the station and under the Hudson River and I sip my coffee as the woods of New Jersey go sweeping past and I wish my love were with me, but she doesn’t love trains, she feels cooped up in them.

I love trains. The Lakeshore Limited route up the Hudson, the City of New Orleans along the Mississippi, the Southwest’s winding run through the Rockies — this is a balm for the soul. A person can cure his anxieties about the future of our democracy, the banking system, the education of the young, by taking a good long look at American geography. It is a great country and don’t doubt it for a minute. A real-estate con man isn’t going to make it greater. Talk to Brits sometime about the corruption of the Tories and the sad state of schoolteachers in the U.K. — it makes me grateful that Thomas Keillor left Yorkshire back in 1774 and came to the New World. It was hard on him, he died soon after, but it’s been very generous to his descendants.

Meanwhile my new motto is “Accept assistance.” I accepted it that night in Annapolis — I did a stand-up show solo in a bar, something I’d not done previously, having worked churches and colleges and civic auditoriums for decades, staying out of barrooms in deference to my evangelical upbringing (even though Jesus patronized such places and drank with Republicans and sinners), but here I was on stage looking at people holding mixed drinks, exotic cocktails, and it was wonderful, the assistance provided by alcohol. I was overwhelmed by the warmth of the crowd thanks to imbibement and I got confused and did 90 minutes of stream-of-consciousness veering across lanes of jokes and through narrow corridors of reminiscence and the crowd, steadily lubricating themselves, loved the spontaneity of it, not knowing the panic behind it, and when in desperation I started a sing-along, they liked it even better. I’ve been a performer most of my life and worked hard at it and now I find out that chaos works better. Just keep changing the subject and never betray panic.

I’ve been a loner long enough, due to the pandemic. Dinner parties disappeared because you can’t eat while wearing a mask. We all got used to working at home in our pajamas and the camaraderie of the office went up in smoke. COVID was a ready excuse to stay home and watch a ball game on TV. But now, thanks to the liquidity of that evening in Annapolis, I’m ready to rejoin civil society. Shoulder to shoulder, folks. We’re all in this together. You need assistance, I’m here.

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I missed the Fourth of July parade with Uncle Sam striding along on stilts and a wagon drawn by Percherons with a band playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever” in double time, but maybe they don’t do that anymore, maybe they ran out of men who could walk on stilts with confidence and who fit the Uncle Sam suit. It was a slim fit.

I’m not nostalgic about olden times. I love these passwords and PINs that give me the sense of foreign agents trying to get into my email, steal my prescription for metoprolol. I am fond of the GPS woman who gives us directions in such a sympathetic tone, not condescending at all. I adore my laptop and have no warm memories of my Underwood typewriter. Someday I believe the GPS woman may become a therapist and tell me to put regrets behind and prescribe a memory-loss drug that will do exactly that.

I do feel that young people are overloaded with electronic stimulation. I worry about the environment and economics. I sat in the Oyster Bar and ate a cheeseburger and overheard two smart guys talking about the banking system in a way that made me queasy and I said to them, “But it’s not as bad as it looks, right?” and one of them said, “No, it’s worse.” I heard about a college history teacher who was asked by a student, “You talked about World War Two, does that mean there was a First?” This was not high school, this was c-o-l-l-i-t-c-h.

I avoid the apprehension of imminent disaster. My theory of economics is called Gratitudemy, as found in Psalm 23: “My cup runneth over.” I’m a cockeyed optimist. I picked it up during the pandemic. Yes, it was rough, people died, but it had its bright side too. Millions escaped their cubicles and got to work at home in their pajamas and there (guess what?) they discovered that their 40-hour workweek as Creative Inclusivity Outreach Director was easily done in 20 or 25 and they found an additional job as Corporate Mission Influencer and now they’re earning a decent wage. It was a huge gift to us introverts. Dinner parties disappeared because you can’t eat while masked. My calendar was wiped clean. Suddenly life became more like it used to be than it ever was before.

And so I set aside the past and retreat into the present and take pleasure in the morning coffee, the granola with berries, the appearance of She Whom I Love, the conversational path over familiar ground, then on to the morning’s work, and in this routine there is serenity to be found and freedom from the vast treasury of available anxiety.

She Whom I Love asks, “Don’t you miss Minnesota? Are you sure you can be happy in New York?” I do and I can. In Minnesota are people I’ve known almost my entire life and when we converse it is deeply satisfying, like hearing Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade for Strings” for the 50th or 60th time, but there’s so much of my past in Minnesota that I don’t care to relive, namely pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth, if you want to know the truth, but with old age and decrepitude your sins become less deadly. Pride vanishes, your greed is satisfied by any ATM and sleep becomes the object of your lust. You envy the young until you hear them talk about how overstressed they are. Gluttony is the occasional bacon cheeseburger. Wrath is behind you, thanks to sloth, of which you have a good steady supply, so what’s there to be angry about? As they say in Denmark, “Shut up and be beautiful.”

I know I’m an old man because I don’t know who Ryan Seacrest is and everyone else does. I grew up in a city where I rode my bike past a lumbermill, a huge clothing factory, a slaughterhouse, many printing plants — I could feel the ground vibrate from the mighty presses rolling in them — and now these buildings have become colonies of condos, artists’ studios, chic restaurants, office buildings where people with liberal arts degrees sit squinting at computers, people whose job titles (Creative Governance Modeling, Digital Experience Director) make no sense to me, and the ground doesn’t vibrate anymore.

But yes, there was a World War I, it was a horror, google “Battle of Verdun” sometime and it’ll make you feel fortunate to have not known anything about it.

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Joe Biden came to our apartment building for a fundraiser last week and the lobby was full of men in dark suits and sunglasses and I never got the chance to tell him that he needs to find a good recreational activity that will endear him to the millions of Americans who get their news from pictures rather than reading text. Standing at a lectern reading a speech is not enough. A candidate for president needs to look good while having fun, preferably in the great outdoors.

John F. Kennedy was a sailor and that image of him, at the helm of a boat steering into the Atlantic waves, was our first and lasting impression of him. He looked great with the wind in his face. Ronald Reagan looked terrific on horseback, thanks to his acting experience. He easily defeated Jimmy Carter who, against the advice of advisors, ran in a six-mile race and collapsed and the Secret Service had to carry him away, looking pale and sweaty and semi-conscious, not a good look for the Leader of the Free World.

Serious candidates should avoid strenuous physical activity of all sorts. You look exhausted and you’re likely to stumble, which would be seen by fifty million people and millions of advertising dollars would go down the toilet. Golf is the preferred presidential sport. You look good swinging a club and nobody notices that the ball landed in a marsh.

After Carter, Reagan beat Walter Mondale whose sport was fishing. A fisherman against a horseman? No contest. Walter should’ve gone fishing for tuna out on the Atlantic while at the helm of a yacht and haul the big fish into the boat himself without assistance while grinning, but instead he was in a rowboat on a lake in Minnesota. He didn’t look like a commander in chief; he looked like an insurance salesman.

Michael Dukakis was a capable governor but then he took a ride in a tank while wearing a helmet and he looked like a kid at an amusement park. That one photograph did him in. A presidential candidate should never be seen in a helmet. Same with wet suits. John Kerry wore one while windsurfing and it’s not a good look, it makes you look reptilian.

Al Gore would’ve been elected president if only he’d had a sport to offset his preachiness about climate change: touch football, tennis, horseshoes — if he’d hit a ringer and yelled, “Yes!” he’d’ve won Florida going away and become president and done good things to stabilize climate change but we never saw the fun side of him and the country suffered for that.

Hillary Clinton had no recreational activity other than attending committee meetings. Bowling could’ve worked for her: one strike and her leaping in the air and giving high-fives and whooping would’ve won her Wisconsin and the White House.

Biden needs a sport to put to rest the whispers about dodderiness. It’s nice to see him putting his arms around his dog and his grandkids — his predecessor was no hugger except with a few foreign leaders — but Biden needs to be seen being physically active. The press is waiting, cameras poised, hoping to see the guy stumble, and what you need to do, Joe, is go hiking in an open grassy area in chaps and boots, a leather vest, a bright red cap, a faithful dog at your side, a shotgun on your shoulder. The dog dashes ahead and flushes a pheasant from the brush and you raise the gun and fire it.

Yes, this will offend some vegans and progressives and people with pet pheasants, but everything you do comes with a price, and Dems need to broaden the base. The FDR wing of the party has faded away, we need to attract some people with tattoos and purple hair. Dems do well among fencers and archers but you need to connect with the rural male population that loves firearms. Guns have been around since the 14th century. Get with it. Teddy Roosevelt had the disadvantage of a pampered New York upbringing and he overcame it by going out west and shooting things.

Americans want a leader who is not so obsessed with bureaucracy and jargon that he/she doesn’t know how to have a good time. You pick up a shotgun and you’re no longer a geezer, you’re iconic, you’re Buffalo Bill, Matt Dillon, Audie Murphy, GI Joe. You’ve got all the social workers and teachers, Joe, now you need to get the farmers and the cops.

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I’m an octogenarian from the days of the party-line telephone, back when we loved singing murder ballads in the third grade and were proud of our cursive writing but I come back to reality by reading Elizabeth Kolbert who writes scary nonfiction about the future.

She’s an excellent writer — The Sixth Extinction, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future — and her current piece in The New Yorker, “How Plastics Are Poisoning Us,” is one that Exxon and Shell and Coca-Cola and Nestlé are praying you won’t read and doing their best to extinguish any meaningful measures in Congress, meanwhile science is trying to send us a message: plastic is everywhere, the sea is full of it, it’s found in human placentas, Americans go through some 500 pounds of it per person per year, it is not really recyclable, some of it is known to be carcinogenic, according to objective scholarly peer-reviewed data assembled by those nerdy kids who sat in the front of the chemistry classroom and did all the assignments.

I remember Grandma’s farm back when I was a kid, we used an outhouse, she cooked over a woodstove, the milk from the Holsteins in the barn and the eggs from her chickens who ran free, the vegetables came out of the garden nurtured by manure, and I don’t recall any plastic at all, just some waxed paper.

I don’t see us returning to that way of life but when I read Elizabeth Kolbert I look around the apartment and feel like a war criminal and the war I’m complicit in is a war against our grandchildren and their progeny.

As Grandma got older she appreciated the vacuum cleaner, the radio, the flush toilet, the plastic Tupperware bowl. She was born in 1880 and lived into the nuclear age when our idea of apocalypse was thermonuclear war, though I don’t think Grandma could envision that, and now I can’t envision the arid uninhabitable plasticized earth that apparently there is ample reason to envision.

I read about plastic and take small steps: no more fizzy water in plastic bottles, run tap water into a glass and if you want bubbles, blow into it with a paper straw. Buy less stuff. Take public transportation. Skip fast food and buy salad makings at the farmers market. Don’t buy vegetables flown in from California. Read the newspaper online.

The paper put out a list of the best olive oils described variously as “herbaceous and peppery,” “moderately grassy,” and “fruity and buttery,” but olive oil is not an important source of pleasure in my life and so I buy the locally grown, which tastes like soybeans and comes in glass bottles.

The salad is more important than the olive oil, and more important than the salad is the conversation over the salad, and I choose to avoid apocalyptic talk in favor of silliness. I don’t talk about plastics over lunch. I talk about David who died and an angel took him out of the line at the golden gates and drove him in a limo through the suburbs of Heaven to the most exclusive section and a high-rise, an apartment with a big balcony on the 44th floor, one floor below Mother Teresa. David said, “What gives? Why me? I’m no saint.” The angel said, “David, you’re the first investment banker ever to make it to heaven.”

I’m a dad, I do dad jokes. A man walked up to a woman standing on the shore and asked, “How do I get to the other side of the river?” and she said, “This IS the other side.” I talk about the man who lay in bed looking up at the Milky Way, the various constellations, the moon, and then wondered, “What happened to the ceiling?” A cat ate a ball of yarn and three months later gave birth to three mittens.

I try to focus on today rather than brood about the future. I put things where I will remember them: my eyeglasses I put on the ironing board, which begins with an I. I remember when I bend down to empty the dishwasher to not to stand up suddenly and bang my head on the open cupboard door, which if you do it often you won’t remember where you put anything, including yourself. I practice kindness. I used to correct someone when they misused an intransitive verb by making it an object and I don’t anymore. And when I have said what I have to say, I stop.

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I made a trip last week I’ve been meaning to take for decades and finally got to Concord, Mass., and found Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, which is vast — I’d hesitate to live in a town with so much mortality — and climbed the hill to Henry Thoreau’s grave marked with a stone the size of a pencil box that simply says “Henry” and thanked him for his work and also expressed my regret that he never got entangled in romance with a woman, which would’ve made his writing livelier, had there been a double bed in his cabin at Walden Pond and someone to disagree with him when he wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” The desperation could’ve been relieved by someone putting her hands on his shoulders and kissing the back of his neck.

In photographs, Thoreau is as ugly as a mud fence but that’s because he hated cameras. My grandma did too. She scowled when someone got out a Brownie and so her descendants who never met her think of her as severe, which she was not. She was a teacher, as Henry tried to be, and she had high expectations of people.

Thoreau’s great work wasn’t Walden but his daily journal in which he wrote about his walks in the woods and fields, what he saw, what he loved. Walden is blighted by a great deal of pontificating about solitude and independence. If there had been a Mrs. Thoreau, she’d have agreed with him on “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.” And she would’ve scoffed at his nonsense — “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” He was chewing on the wrong weed when he came up with that, a line that has led people to waste years writing a bad novel who could’ve been happy bus drivers. Henry wouldn’t have said so much about the necessity of solitude with a woman looking over his shoulder.

The real man is in the journals, watching tall grass in an easterly wind rippling like waves on the sea; he loved grasses, the meadows and pastures, the metallic cry of the bobolink, and going down to the pond where he saw “singularly clean and handsome bullfrogs, with fine yellow throats sharply separated from their pickle-green heads by their firmly shut mouths, and with beautiful eyes.” He stood in a rainstorm and watched the torrent running in the gutters, he studied minnows and butterflies, and he isn’t telling us how to live our lives, just pointing out what fascinates and moves him. He sees skunk cabbage dying in October and sees among the dead leaves some fresh buds of eventual cabbage, the great circle of life complete, the prospect of resurrection.

And now he lies in his narrow bed, under the tablet with his name, forever on a first-name basis with his visitors, surrounded by his relations, the successful authors nearby under the oak trees, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott, and Henry’s boss Ralph Waldo Emerson under a gigantic boulder, and as I stood at his feet and wished a luckier life for him, I felt a wet snout shoved into my right hand and a bundle of fur push against my leg and a man said, “Elsa, no” and here was an enormous black dog, the man holding the leash. I scratched her ears and neck and she was very polite, simply anxious for affirmation. He said she was a Burmese mountain dog. “Summer is hard for her, she gets hot,” he said. “She loves winter. She’ll lie outdoors sleeping in a blizzard. We’re on our way to her favorite creek. It’s her spa.”

For a moment I thought maybe Henry should’ve had a dog to keep him company but a dog would’ve spooked the wildlife he wanted to see, so what’s the point. Loneliness is an asset. He tramped the fields around Concord and wrote it all down for his closest friend, the invisible reader — as St. Emily wrote, “To comprehend a nectar requires sorest need” and with his journals, the reader feels needed, the good man is conducting a tour and without you there listening to him, it wouldn’t make sense. So look him up sometime. He’s still quite lively on the page. And if you despair, don’t broadcast it, keep it quiet, and do as Henry did and go for a walk and look at the grass and the birds and be happier.

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MOLLY MALONE
One day incognito I walked in Sausalito
And first laid eyes on Molly Malone.
As she drove her U-Haul through town, crying, “You all,
Getcher cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o.”

She was a fishmonger and her voice was stronger
Than an earthquake siren there in San Francisco.
From Marin to Palo Alto, her mighty contralto:
Cried, “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o.”

I said, “Could you stifle your voice just a trifle,
Perhaps stuff a rag in your mouth, don’t you know.
But she didn’t hear me though she stood near me,
Crying, “Cockles, whatever, alive, alive-o.”

The right to free speech — does it mean you can screech
As you peddle your wares like a manifesto
From Divisadero to the Embarcadero
Crying, “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o.”

I tried the Presidio, I tried Daly City, O
I tried San Jose for two days or so
Then I saw her and said, “Ma’am those mussels look dead.”
She replied, “My mussels are alive, alive-o.”

I moved to Los Angeles where the bauble and bangle is
Clamorous and clangorous and the hustle really bustles,
And yet it was restful and downright unstressful
Compared to the cry of cockles and mussels.

I lived in a canyon with a lovely companion,
A girl with a very soft voice, a real gem,
And nothing upset us, we ate fruit and lettuce,
And never touched shellfish, especially C&M.

And I lived in Yosemity in great serenity
Enjoying the life of an old essayist,
So peaceful and still and tranquil until
I came to San Francisco because I missed the mist.

And I saw Miss Molly as she got off the trolley
And her voice was loud like an aerial bomb.
Along Van Ness Avenue, she hollered, “I have a new
Website, Cockles & Mussels dot com.”

She gave me an oyster and I rejoiced, her
Voice was softer, and we went to a bar
And had a debacle and I ate a cockle
That had staphylococcus and went to the ER.

They pumped out my gut from gullet to butt,
And opened me up, despite my demurral,
And the surgeon, goldurn it, he took an eternity,
But he found the oyster and inside it a pearl.

I gave it to Molly and she let out a volley
Of whoopees and wahoos and yippees and cheers.
I said to her, “Yes? No?” and she took me to Fresno,
We got married and we have been happy for years.

She went on a diet and that made her quiet
And when I miss her rowdy good cheer,
I fix her clam chowder and that makes her louder
And she cries, “I love you!” so the neighbors can hear.

(from a book in the works, SALAD OF BALLADS by Garrison Keillor)

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I had blurry vision for a couple years and found it hard to read the newspaper and then an ophthalmologist at Mayo did a three-minute painless laser procedure and a few days later I could read the paper, no problem, clear as day, and also watch a ball game on TV and keep track of the triple as it caromed off the right field wall. Literacy does have its drawbacks, of course. You get more tangled up in the details of malfeasance and depravity than you would like to be. I come from evangelical people who read Scripture and didn’t linger on Cain’s murder of Abel or David seeing the naked Bathsheba and sending her husband off to war. So the thump-thump-thump of the Donald is tiring, though it’s also impressive to read about how the other 1/1000ths of one percent do business, such as the story about the multibillion-dollar golf course and hotel development on the coast of Oman where migrant workers are laboring in 103-degree heat for $340/month on a project where villas will sell for up to $13 million, a project financed by Saudi and Omani money, in which a managing sweetheart partner who put no money down will be the guy who’s the victim of the biggest and most vicious witch hunt in the history of the United States.

The ethics issues are dizzying. The guy was once Leader of the Free World and intends to resume the position, which is his by right. As such, he deals in foreign policy in behalf of the people of the United States. Their interests are not identical to those of oil trillionaires. Clearly, the gentleman is steering us into uncharted waters, as he has so assiduously done for many years. He occupies a realm previously belonging to fiction.

I was worried when the submersible went down with the Titanic that he might’ve paid a quarter-million to go down and view the wreckage and see how he could bring it up and monetize it piece by piece, but luckily he did not. He is busy steering the Republican Party toward the iceberg of established law and if he hits it and it splits into chunks and he sells them to the Saudis to chill their drinks, then there is no point in teaching law anymore. Look back in history: did Trump University have a law school? No, it did not.

If the law doesn’t apply to the big guys, then the peons and pissants are not going to abide by it either. Gangs will roam the streets, taking what they will, and we whose parents brought us up not to lie or steal will need to find hired guns to keep the mob at bay. It’ll be the Wild West but on steroids.

My fellow Democrats were wrong when we scorned Lawn Order as inherently repressive back when Republicans were in favor of it. Lawn Order is to the benefit of the children, the most vulnerable among us, and the elderly and infirm, and dreamy idealists such as my fellow English majors. I see them in the park with their little notebooks, writing something about trees and clouds. These people are a sitting target for any bully with a paring knife. This is why defunding the police is the biggest fraud to come down the pike since the sale of the Brooklyn Bridge. We who sit in the park and write sonnets need crooks to be afraid of cops. Criminals tend to be incredibly stupid but they know that guns shoot and bullets hurt.

You and I do not have the skill set that the Trump family has. Think what you will about Hunter Biden, he didn’t have the savvy of Jared Kushner who got the Saudis to drop two billion into his investment firm Affinity. What Taylor Swift is to teenage girls, Donald is to grown-up vandals. But we need the Trumps to know there are Jack Smiths on the job. And call me naïve but when I tune in the ball game, I honestly believe the home plate ump is not on the other team’s payroll. I can’t prove it but this faith makes it possible to enjoy the game, and if there’s no pleasure in it then why are we paying so much attention?

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I was eager to deliver a commencement address this spring and had one prepared but nobody invited me, which is a shame, because mine is more practical than 78% of the ones the Class of 2023 had to sit still for. It is a speech in favor of not rushing ahead to confront injustice and correct wrongs but to encourage other people to do it and then see what happens to them.

Everyone is in favor of courage and standing up to authority but there are advantages to cowardice too and a person should consider all options before picking up your bright sword and charging forth into the breach. I’m thinking of my classmates who went out for football and got dinged for the glory of the Maroon and Gray and now they’re unable to multiply fractions or recite “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, the droghte of March hath perced to the roote,” or tell the difference between a subjunctive mood and an introspective one, and when they shake their head No, I hear dinging. I’m thinking of idealistic friends who went to work for the Federated Organization of Associations thinking they’d reform it and they became executive vice presidents of artificial intelligence and lost their ability to speak genuine English.

I became a poet and wanted to create pure beauty out of rainbows and rosebuds and flocks of birds singing madrigals and I was up against angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, and it was no contest, same as my gentle folkie friends singing about looking at clouds from both sides got blown away by Springsteen’s Nebraska guy with the sawed-off .410 on his lap going through the Wyoming badlands killing everything in his path. Kindness is not necessarily a winning hand in this world.

Same with the Republicans running for president this year. Their inner Boy Scout — and Nikki Haley’s inner Camp Fire Girl — is urging them to speak the truth and go after the Man, as in “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead,” but many wise captains have been careful to keep another ship between them and the torpedoes and thereby survived the war and received medals for heroism because the real heroes had been hit by torpedoes.

Ordinarily, candidates would gang up on their leading competitor and criticize his policies and positions on issues, but this year’s Republican race isn’t about issues or policies, it’s about the most outrageous and vicious witch hunt in American history carried on by Biden’s band of closet thugs, misfits, Marxists, targeting Trump because he’s the only man who’s man enough to beat them, and this pitch seems to resonate with enough Republican voters that a sensible candidate hesitates to be the first to utter the words “paranoid lunatic” — let someone else have the honor of running down the landing ramp and rushing onto the beachhead, they will remain at the stern and see how the battle progresses.

As Mark Twain said, “To do good is noble. To tell others to do good is even nobler and much less trouble.” He also said that the secret of success is ignorance and confidence, the two combined are unbeatable, as we can see from the guy with the squiggles in his hair. He is a coward like me; we both skipped football so we didn’t get concussed and he is able to give long speeches with big words, and we dodged the draft, refusing to give our lives to advance the political fortunes of Richard M. Nixon.

I would’ve told the Class of 2023 to be wary of the advice of commencement speakers to aim high and be the best you can be, which has led many people to spend a pile of dough on a fancy college degree who could’ve gotten a more useful education by driving a cab in New York for a few years. My college education taught me how to write intelligently about books I never read, a talent that leads in the wrong direction. I wish that instead I had interviewed my parents and written their life story. Knowing where you come from is a good thing before you start out to achieve greatness. Someday you’ll wish you had done this so why not do it now? Drive cab by day, write family history at night. I guarantee that inspiration will strike.

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I had lunch last week with a woman who is two months away from motherhood and it was sweet to watch her caressing the basketball under her blouse, patting it, lifting it slightly, mindful of this modest freight that will, she knows, change her life, though thankfully she can’t know how much. She and her man were married on my terrace in New York five years ago and when my wife and I sit out there, we sometimes think of them. A Korean man, a Portuguese woman, who met in Paris, married by our friend Judge Ira Globerman who grew up Jewish in an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, so there was some diversity going on. He presided as a favor since they’d arrived from France and needed to be a legal couple before the visa ran out. They lived in Brooklyn and then wended up to a town in Connecticut. Her parents will come from Portugal for the birth.

It’s easy for me to romanticize pregnancy since I’ve never gone through it personally except from the inside when I was an embryo. I never walked around with a tenant inside me. So I look at her and am awestruck to think that we all come into the world exactly this way, our thoughtful mother patting her abdomen as she eats like a farmhand. Family is family: when my grandma lay dying in 1964, she was faithfully tended by her daughters, not hospital staff. I came down the chute in 1942 in a big house on Ferry Street in Anoka, Minnesota, not long before my dad went into the Army. As a toddler, I was proud of him in his uniform and I guarded his chair at the dinner table and wouldn’t let anyone sit in it. “Daddy’s chair,” I said.

And now, at lunch, I get the urge to live another ten years so I can witness this boy’s raising. “He will speak French as well as English,” the mother says. “He will have no choice about that.” Very well, but maybe I should be his Anglo uncle and sing him the songs my grandma sang to me, the one about the babes in the woods, and Susanna who came from Alabama with a banjo on her knee, and the old gray goose who died in the millpond standing on her head, the gander is weeping because his wife is dead.

His mother is a photographer and I love her work for its humor and gaiety. Coming from Europe with so much horrible history, she made a series of pictures in New York of a young woman viewing city scenes while holding a cluster of bright balloons. I liked one so much I put it on the cover of my book. The balloons represent joie de vivre, of course. My American photographer friends, growing up in the placid Midwest, don’t do joie, they do realism, black and white, some humor but also despair. I understand; I too grew up assuming that great art tends toward the dark side. But I want to sing “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” to this boy when he gets his English in place and the one about the rockets’ red glare and the girl I met on Monday and my heart stood still, da doo ron ron ron da doo ron ron.

At lunch with a pregnant woman, you talk about ordinary life, family, summer, the food, the elation of the kids at the graduation we’d attended that morning and the pride of their parents, and we never set foot in politics at all. The naked ex-emperor is 77 and he is irrelevant to the life around us so it’s a pleasure to ignore him. By the time this boy gets around to studying American fascism, I will be gone from the world and unconcerned about the weaponization of falsehoods. But I want to leave something behind that this boy might cherish. I don’t expect him to read my novels. I only want him to know I existed and that I was capable of delight. E.g.––

We live by kindness and grace,

Good manners, books, an embrace,

Good water, good light,

A pencil to write,

And a bright orange stub to erase,

And yet I cannot forget

Those great bawdy stories, you bet,

When we sat with good folks

And told dirty jokes

Until everyone’s trousers were wet.

God bless the child. I don’t know his name but I pray for him diligently day by day.

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I like the word “weaponization,” and I am looking for an opportunity to use it if, say, a cop pulled me over for making an illegal left turn (but I don’t drive anymore) or when a waiter puts silverware on the table — say, “Don’t weaponize that fork” — (but that would be awkward) or yell it at the e-bikes that race through red lights but they’re going so fast, they wouldn’t hear it.

I don’t recall that Richard Nixon used the word during Watergate or Bill Clinton when he was impeached for perjuring himself but I don’t think it will carry much weight now because the federal indictment was brought by Jack Smith, which is a great name for a prosecutor. It’s right out of a Dick Tracy comic. The name “Merrick Garland” sounds a little fruity to me, but I imagine DOJ looking down the list of prosecutorial names and eliminating the ones that ended with a vowel or a “ski” or “ovich,” until they found “Jack Smith” and yelled, “That’s it! Weaponize him!”

But the word is available for our use and the other morning when my wife looked at me and handed me a Kleenex and said, “Blow your nose,” and I did and then she pointed to her left nostril and I blew my left nostril and she said, “Again,” and I did it again and she said, “Okay” — it occurred to me that I could’ve said, “You are weaponizing that Kleenex in order to humiliate me and frustrate my attempt to make our home great again,” but it was too late. She was busy with her Dustbuster.

And then I looked at the Kleenex and saw what I’d blown into it and was somewhat chastened. I am a college graduate, the author of a couple decent novels and some sonnets that stand up pretty well, and I don’t think I should be going around the streets of New York with a noseful for the general public to observe. The doorman at our apartment building is not going to hand me a Kleenex and say, “Blow,” nor is anyone in the 86th Street subway station. (Maybe a retired third grade teacher might, but how many of those are you likely to encounter? I assume they’ve all gone to live in cabins in the Poconos.) Nor will a woman on the downtown B train say, “You have mustard on your shirt.” My wife is the only person who provides this service. Likewise, she does not turn to a policeman on the corner and say, “Would you mind scratching my back up between the shoulder blades?” That is my job and my privilege. I am her scratcher.

We are here to serve each other. Laws are meant to be enforced. The legal system, while it has its faults, is crucial to the maintenance of a civil society so that I can walk out the door and down the street with some confidence that a bozo won’t yell, “Go back where you came from!” and poke me in the snoot.

I am a man of privilege. I freely admit it. I am, I believe, the only writer in America who wrote a screenplay in which I played myself and the character played by Meryl Streep kissed me — it was right there in the script and she did it and unfortunately she required no retakes, but I wrote myself being kissed by her and thousands of people saw this back when there were movie theaters with giant screens — and yet I am a mortal human being too, and I sometimes snort in my sleep and my wife pokes me and tells me to turn the other way. And sometimes I am so absorbed in the artistry of my writing that I don’t notice what’s going on with my nose, and she has to hand me a Kleenex.

The indictment handed down by Jack Smith really should name Melania as a conspirator. It is a wife’s responsibility to say, “What in the world are you doing with those boxes?” when she sees a hundred of them piled in the basement and when she spots the “Top Secret” printed on them in bright red she’s supposed to yell, “Are you out of your mind? Get these out of here or I’m taking the kid and going to Slovenia.” But a wife who lets her husband go around with his hair like that, the little dinguses behind his ears, you have to wonder.

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