Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 25

Bob Douglas (April 22, 1948 – December 1, 2022) SONG LIST:Irish Fiddle TunesIs It TimeCanaan’s LandGoing Up Home to Live in Green PasturesThere’s No Hiding Place Down HereAnchored in Love

Bob Douglas was cheerful, the mandolinist in the Powdermilk Biscuit Band in the early days of A Prairie Home Companion, who loved gospel songs, having grown up with them, even “It’s G-L-O-R-Y to Know That I’m S-A-V-E-D,” and he dove into bluegrass and swing tunes and played a driving backbeat on the fiddle standards, a dedicated devotee and serious folkie, but audiences get restless and earnestness only goes so far, and Bob’s ace card was playing spoons. He kept them in his back pocket, ordinary kitchen spoons. No silver spoons, the tone was clanky. He held two spoons back to back an inch apart in his right hand, did elaborate rolls against the spread fingers of his left hand, and the rickety-tickety-bop glittery-flibbertigibbet shave-and-a-haircut drove the crowd wild. It never failed.

He worked hard to master a complicated instrument, the mandolin, but it was the parlor trick of spoonerism that blew them away—there’s a lesson in humility here.

Bob wasn’t eager to play the spoons, he was a mandolinist, not a clown, but he did it when it was needed and did it with a beautiful big smile, syncopating around, percussing hand-to-knee and off his forehead, bopping on the guitarist’s shoulder, rapping on the knees of a kid in the front row, then the kid’s father, he made solemn hippies whoop like third graders. Sometimes he’d switch to wooden spoons for the clackety tone. It was cheerfulness at work.

Garrison Keillor from Cheerfulness

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I was an infant when Allied forces crossed the Channel and landed at Normandy in 1944 and none of my uncles were there, the only D-Day vet I knew was my high school biology teacher Lyle Bradley who dove into a foxhole under enemy fire and two men fell on top of him, both dead, who shielded him from a nearby mortar explosion, but he never told me about it until he was an old man and so my first knowledge of it came from A.J. Liebling’s accounts in The New Yorker, which I read as a college kid and reread last week on the anniversary. Reading them the first time made me want to be a writer and the rereading was no less stunning.

Joe Liebling was a war correspondent aboard a 155-foot landing craft that hit Omaha Beach at dawn and dropped off infantry and advance teams of engineers assigned to clear away mines and obstacles and he stood topside and reported what he saw and heard. He went to a chapel service, a chaplain quoting St. Paul, “If God be for us, who can be against us?” Printed copies of General Eisenhower’s message to the troops were passed out and men autographed them for each other as souvenirs. Liebling had boarded the boat days before and gotten to know the sailors who refer to the amphibious force as “the ambiguous farce” and the troops of the First Division who’ll go ashore — “The First Division is always beefing about something, which adds to its effectiveness as a fighting unit,” he writes. A trooper boards, saying, “Did you ever see a goddamn gangplank set in the right place?”

Liebling wrote that on the crossing, everyone was “in the same mood: everybody hopes he won’t get seasick. On the whole, this is a favorable morale factor. A soldier cannot fret about possible attacks by the Luftwaffe or E-boats while he is preoccupied by himself and the vague fear of secret weapons on the far shore is balanced by the fervent desire to get the far shore under his feet.”

So when the boat slips past the big ships and drops the two landing ramps and the battle is joined, you sort of know the guys who dash forward into five feet of water and struggle toward the beach and the cliff beyond, the German pillboxes firing tracer bullets, the thunder of Allied artillery. He hears a BBC announcer announce that the landing was carried out “with surprising ease.” “I called briefly upon God,” Liebling wrote. “D-Day hadn’t seemed like that to us. There is nothing like a broadcasting studio in London to give a chap perspective.”

The first man ashore is a young coastguardsman from a small town in Mississippi who’ll carry a guideline ashore so the disembarking soldiers will have something to hang onto if they step into a hole. The guy is wearing a swimsuit. He went to Tulane and he wants to become a newspaperman. He says he’s a “pretty good” swimmer. So when you read later that he was hit by a German shell as he stepped off the ramp and was blown apart, you grieve for him.

It was stunning, to be so gripped by writing that had gripped me as a college kid, that I read over and over again. I got to The New Yorker five years after Liebling died in 1964 and I had lunch once with his colleague Joseph Mitchell who remembered Joe sitting in an office down the hall tapping away on a typewriter and stopping to laugh at what he’d written. “He was the only New Yorker writer who enjoyed reading his own stuff,” Mitchell said. “Most of us thought writers were supposed to agonize but Joe loved a good turn of phrase.”

I read the piece in the magazine’s archive, columns of type between ads for cigarettes and Rodgers’ and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma” and the Crosley automobile and men’s double-breasted suits, and it struck me how far we’ve come from Liebling’s respect for soldiering and his fondness for the democratic spirit of the military, men from Kansas and Bensonhurst and South Dakota coming together, beefing about the chow, the highfalutin manners of the officer corps, putting their lives on the line in defense of Europe.

What came between the beach at Normandy and today was a series of disasters, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and when my cousin Ron got to Vietnam, he wrote to his brother, “Do whatever you need to do to not wind up here.” Mr. Bradley came ashore that June day in 1944 and was reluctant to talk about it. Other men died all around him and it wasn’t his place to play the hero. But Joe Liebling honored the men in uniform and if you want to do likewise, go read him.

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I have said this before and I’ll keep saying it: isolation is dangerous, we need close contact with our fellow humanity to keep us sane, and that was the weird thing about the pandemic and now the yellowish air from Canadian wildfires and the scary bulletins to Stay Indoors, Windows Closed. I live in New York because there always are people around and it’s comforting to know that if you fall down, people will rush to your side. I know, it’s happened. Back home, downtown Minneapolis is so deserted that nobody’d notice except maybe a passenger in a passing car and he’d figure you were drunk and decide not to get involved.

Isolation leads to dread and paranoia and though COVID has abated, people are still choosing to work from home rather than commute to the office, a trend that if it continues will fill our streets with thousands of delivery boys on e-bikes and turn office buildings into vast dormitories and bring an end to proximitous creative collaboration and make America a nation of menial technocrats and your doctor will examine your prostate by Zoom. Personally, I hope not.

Even though I live in New York City, I go back to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota for health care, not only because it’s excellent — I was due to expire twenty years ago and Mayo has extended my life — but also because you get to mingle with interesting people such as farmers and truck drivers whom you’re unlikely to meet in Manhattan and the nurses and technicians are everlastingly amiable.

Ordinarily I’m very cautious striking up a conversation with a woman I don’t know but when she has poked a needle in me and is drawing blood, it feels like we’ve established a relationship. So:

ME: It feels like you’ve done this before.

HER: Once or twice. Where you from?

ME: New York.

HER: You sound like you’re from Minnesota.

ME: Used to be.

HER: What do you do in New York?

ME: Walk in the park, go to plays and concerts, eat in restaurants.

HER: I mean, for work.

ME: I’m a writer. But I don’t live there for that — I live there because my wife loves New York.

HER: Smart man. How long you been married?

ME: Thirty years.

HER: So it worked.

I love this exchange. It’s simple ordinary civility, shared good humor. She’s from the town of Zumbrota not far from Mayo. She’s heard all sorts of guy nonsense, she can give as good as she can get. I drop in on my ophthalmologist and complain of blurred vision (duh, I’m 80) and he does a laser procedure on me and three days later my vision clears up significantly, which is a miracle, and I write him a limerick:

My eye doctor, good Dr. Chen

Did magic recently when

He lasered one eye

Briefly, now I

Who couldn’t read signs

Or books or the Times

Can read them clearly again.

And this, for me,

Who am literary

Is a miracle, God bless. Amen.

I go to church in New York and it’s Youth Sunday and teenagers give the homily and lead us in prayer for the sick and the oppressed and for our planet home. I can now read “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee” out of the hymnal and I am joyful all the way home, walking down Columbus Avenue through throngs of young people shopping at Trader Joe’s, sitting in outdoor cafes, hanging out, giving an account of themselves — it’s a great time in my life when everyone I encounter is younger, I’m in a sea of youth and vitality and my vision is good enough to read the sign on the turtle’s tank in the pet shop window, “Do not tap on glass. This turtle is 40 years old and deserves to live in peace.”

I like peace up to a point but I need to get out on the streets and soak up the tumult, the flutter of small talk. You can read about declining test scores in public schools and conclude that the world is sliding into darkness , but get out on the street and you feel the curiosity and enthusiasm and sociability and other qualities that standardized testing doesn’t measure. A person who only gets his views from the news will inevitably want to head for the woods. I’m tapping on your glass now. Don’t leave town. Go out on the street. Join the crowd. You’ll be smarter, probably happier.

 

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I had my first bratwurst of the year Friday evening, during a thunderstorm on 48th Street and Seventh Avenue, heading for a play, rain pouring down, the Broadway marquees lit up, billboards flashing, lightning overhead, and I stopped at a hot dog stand on the sidewalk, my sweetie holding an umbrella over my head, eight bucks for the brat.

It was an impulse, triggered by my watching my Minnesota Twins on TV the night before beat the Cleveland Guardians in the bottom of the ninth and the Twins ballpark is where I always have a Kramarczuk’s brat and it was important we beat Cleveland because “Guardians” is the dumbest nickname in sports.

The New York guy sliced the brat lengthwise, flattened it under a flatiron on the grill, spritzed mustard on it and stuck it in a bun, and we walked in the downpour to the theater, and this, as it turned out, was the highlight of the evening, the Broadway bratwurst in a thunderstorm.

The play was set in the Sixties in New York and there was a great deal of shouting in it, about politics, psychotherapy, racism, economic injustice, and the actors get to emote and stride about and wave their arms and slam doors in ways that must be very satisfying for them, which New Yorkers did back in the Sixties, I guess, but I’m from the Midwest where we indicate intensity by getting very quiet. I didn’t care for it. When the lights came up for intermission, I was disappointed — I thought the play was over, but my sweetie liked it so we stayed.

Compared to the Broadway brat in the storm, it was not much pleasure, and what bothered me was the feeling that if I’d seen it in the Sixties, when I was in my twenties, I’d have liked it. But Friday was such a wonderful day that I couldn’t get into two hours of anguish.

We took a C train to Broadway and do you know what it’s like when you descend into the subway station and through the turnstiles and walk across the platform as the train slows and without breaking stride you walk aboard the train? It means that everything you did that day was perfect and perfectly timed, and actually that was true.

My love and I were reunited that day after a week apart, my injured knee felt good, and an ophthalmologist back in Minnesota had done a laser procedure on my left eye that cleared up the blurriness so I could now, for the first time in several years, read the paper and see the white baseball on TV as the Twins beat the Guardians (whoever thought up the name should be banned from baseball) in the bottom of the ninth, the game tied 6-6, when Jorge Polanco hit a double to deep right, advancing Christian Vázquez from first to third, and then Willi Castro hit a sacrifice fly to send him home and win. With my improved eyesight I could see that double fall in right. I bought the brat in celebration. The Broadway play did not make a big impression on me.

I’m 80, I remember the Sixties. I went away to college and gained independence, put myself through school, took up writing, married, had a child, and at the end of the decade, a woman at The New Yorker named Mary D. Kierstead, whose job it was to look through the slush pile of submissions from nobodies, picked a story of mine and that was enormous, like a knighthood. I got $600 for it, our rent was $80 a month. I felt lucky. I got into radio.

Walking out of the theater, I thought to myself, “I could write a better play than that,” and maybe I will. A play about an old man eating a magical brat that allows him to travel back to visit his younger self who is highly eager to succeed and the old guy tells the young man to chill out, enjoy life. “I’m you, you’re going to be okay, don’t do dumb things, be happy,” the old man says and he lists some dumb things he did. But young men don’t listen to old men and the young guy thinks he’s a lunatic. It’s a good idea. I need to come up with a title and a second act and of course songs, but I think I’m onto something.

 

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Milady and I are trying to sell our apartment in Minneapolis and become full-time New Yorkers, which is hard for an old Minnesotan such as I, but so be it, time to delete and disperse and join the Minnesota diaspora in Manhattan. People have walked up to me there and said, “I’m from Minnesota, too!” and it’s instant friendship. This never happens to me in Minneapolis.

It’s fascinating to come back home and observe the tides of change. Rural Minnesota is still Lake Wobegon except more fiercely so, more defensive, as they watch Democratic socialists take over Minneapolis, which Republicans call “woke” and dismiss out of hand, but it’s the young overthrowing the old, and there’s a sort of inevitability about it.
They take a dim view of corporate interests just as I did when I was their age, back when I was broke and IRA to me meant “Irish Republican Army.” I was a writer and dressed like a revolutionary though I was, and still am, a confirmed coward, but then people bought my books and I was shoved into the middle class. So here I am.

On Memorial Day, some relatives and I went up to the country graveyard north of Anoka where my dad’s family is buried, his parents James and Dora, the seven siblings and their spouses, and some young ones, tragic deaths, Alec and Shannon, and we put flowers on some graves and then went to Susie’s for rhubarb pie. Rhubarb pie is not found in Manhattan that I’m aware of and it was a staple in the Keillor family, a sour weed stalk sweetened by strawberries, a delicacy known to rural people of limited means.

They were devout gardeners who loved the Lord and studied the Bible and knew something about hard times and I was lucky to know them. I spent time in homes with outhouses where cooking was done on a woodstove and you took a bath in a tin tub of hot water on the kitchen floor. A glimpse of the 19th century.

I don’t need Memorial Day to remind me of my ancestors, I think of them all the time because there were storytellers in the family who loved to visit and talk about their great-grandfather who went to Colorado for the silver rush, a farmer with the urge to keep moving, a self-contradiction, and of his father-in-law, a British seaman who jumped ship and escaped hanging, and how James Keillor, a skilled carpenter left New Brunswick to help his sister Mary whose husband died of TB and took over the farm and raised her kids and then married Dora, the schoolteacher in the school across the road.

I was a boy when I heard the stories and they stick with me. Uncle Lew and Aunt Ruth sat in our living room and talked and talked and I lay on the floor and hung on every word. They were circumspect and much was not mentioned — their cousin Berniece Keillor is in the cemetery, dead from a botched abortion, and there were some hasty marriages in which the woman was already pregnant. And I’m sure there’s more. As my mother, in her 90s, once said to me, “There’s so much I’d still like to know and there’s nobody left to ask.”

It has nothing to do with pride, everything to do with sympathy and feeling our common humanity. They endured, they prayed for their children, they enjoyed their piece of pie. Grandpa James bought the first Model T in Ramsey township, drove it home and turned in at the yard and forgot what he was dealing with, and he pulled back hard on the wheel and shouted “Whoa!” and the car went in the ditch and he had to hitch up his horses and pull himself out. He was laughing when the car went into the ditch and he was laughing as he towed it out. Aunt Ruth told me.

I want to imitate him. Crash and see it as a joke. Old age is just a continuous comedy. So I feel. I’ve done dumber things than you can imagine and someday if you’re nice I’ll tell you about them.

But I’m off to New York. My dad took me to see it when I was 11 and I loved it then and it’s still pretty magnificent. Every day there’s a good chance you’ll see something that knocks your socks off. New Yorkers make a point of being cool and unimpressed: it takes a Minnesotan to show proper astonishment. So here I go, carrying an extra pair of socks.

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The debt limit deal takes an enormous load off my mind, weeks of worrying about what we’d do when the economy crashed and we lose everything and live on the street near a soup kitchen, but now apparently the ship will not sink, and as I understand the deal, the Republicans will raise the debt limit if the Ten Commandments are inscribed on every dollar bill, Disney will make no movies that portray fairies, the southern border will be sealed tight except for food deliveries and migrant farmworkers, all nouns will have the gender of the person speaking, and the word “gay” will simply go away.

I’m willing to give them that. I’m a lib they don’t own. There are other words for “gay” such as “frisky,” “vivacious,” “spiffy,” and “effervescent.” I’ll bet Governor DeSantis has had his effervescent days when he wore bright colors and said frolicsome things, though this has not been evident so far in his campaign for the White House. As for the Current Leading Candidate for the Republican nomination, gaiety seems quite alien. Fulmination is his style. I don’t recall ever seeing a photograph of him petting a dog or hugging a small child or even holding hands with his current wife. So sad, but of course that’s his business, not mine.

Some libs wanted the White House to be renamed the Big House but I was not one of them. I simply feel that the nation should make good on its debts and if the Repubs want to tinker with American culture, good luck. It’s like trying to replace Tina Turner with Ted Turner: it ain’t gonna work, buddy. Making war against the culture is punching the air. We are a curious, lively, rambunctious people. Freedom has a big effect on people and it’s hard to squelch it, you pound on the bubbles and they pop up elsewhere.

I am not putting down the Repubs; some of my best friends, etc. I don’t hold myself up as a paragon of reason, certainly not an octagon or Oregon. Utter stupidity has been a recurrent fact in my life and now and then I find myself reviewing the Five Dumbest Things I’ve Done, which is brutal punishment but it does highlight the Five Luckiest, which take me into the realm of gratitude.

I was married twice before to women who were near total strangers, back when I imagined romance to be a mystery, the more mysterious the better, and in 1987 I did the No. 1 Dumbest when I gave up a radio show I dearly loved in order to make a woman happy — a woman who had married me imagining it would make her happy and it didn’t, of course, and I knew it was a mistake the night I announced my departure on the radio, and I sat in the kitchen with a friend and he said, “I think you should change your mind. You’d make a lot of people happy.” I didn’t do it. That was No. 2.

I’ve lost money on every real estate transaction I’ve done: if I told you the whole story you’d introduce legislation to put me under guardianship. I’ve thrown fistfuls of money into the wind but you can hire smart people to keep you away from the cliff. I am illiterate about the Christian faith that I subscribe to but I feel that God forgives this. Any third grader knows more about the natural world than I do and yet some very smart people are somewhat fond of me.

No, I’m referring to Dumbness in its pure form, when you walk with complete confidence into a brick wall and you don’t learn from this that bricks are solid, solider than flesh.

But stupidity has given me sympathy for other knuckleheads and also admiration for the beautiful competence of American medicine, which has extended my life dramatically, making it possible for me to beat myself up for my mistakes and not just take up space in a cemetery. And eventually it leads to this beautiful revelation: I will never be so dumb again. I’m too old and I adore the woman I married who is also my best-informed critic. This is an outcome devoutly to be wished for.

In the extra time that medical ingenuity has granted me, I intend to walk carefully, mind my manners, do my work, embrace friendship, sleep with my beloved critic, and put aside enmity and grudges and biases. Eighty is too old to be angry. Even seventy is.

 

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The bill in the Texas legislature to require public schools to post the Ten Commandments in every classroom means that teachers may need to explain to small children what “adultery” means and also “take the Lord’s name in vain” but the real problem is the commandment to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. A great many public schools send athletic teams to compete in weekend tournaments that make it hard for players to make it home for the Sabbath, especially if they’re Jewish. In Texas, a conflict between football and religious faith is not going to turn out well for religion. And taking the Lord’s name in vain is inextricably intertwined with sports. Golf, especially.

I grew up among devout Christians who did not say “gosh” or “darn it” because they took euphemisms seriously. My mother would say, “Oh fudge” but more likely, “Oh for pity’s sake.” I’m an old man and cursing still feels unnatural to me; I’ll bet plenty of Texas legislators who voted for the T.C. bill curse up a storm.

The tablets that God handed down to Moses did not constitute Ten Suggestions, they are Commandments. I don’t oppose posting the Ten Commandments, I only propose that they be taken seriously. And it’s hard to see how allowing people to shop on Sunday and order alcohol in restaurants is keeping the Sabbath holy. I am just saying it because it’s true.

I take Scripture seriously and so I eat beef as it tells us we can in Leviticus, and I also eat salads but not Caesar salads because he was a pagan emperor, but I admit to giving in to wrath, which goes against Scripture. I do it again and again. Like you, I am a bundle of contradictions.

Like many of my fellow Episcopalians, I maintain a progressive enlightened exterior while guarding my simple peasant biases such as my loathing of the use of fancy words like “ubiquitous” in simple conversation, it makes me want to give them a knuckle sandwich if it weren’t for the fact that I’m an author and must protect my hands. Or people who kill conversation by delivering extensive synopses of an article about political polarization that they’ve read recently — POW, right in the kisser.

I absolutely despise the little quiz that pops up on the screen when I finish a transaction online — “On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your experience ordering from Goodwill? Have you been satisfied with the used clothing you’ve purchased? How likely are you to recommend Goodwill to your friends?” — this sort of thing makes me want to throw my laptop out the window even if it might mean hitting an e-biker on the noggin and he hits the pavement and is run over by a guy on an e-scooter. But the T.C. forbid murder so I simply click Delete and move on. Scripture is very much in favor of deletion; deletion is crucial in matters of faith. Love and kindness are fundamental and the acquisition of wealth and power are not.

The verse I would paint on the walls of the Texas legislature is “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” A good verse for me and you too. To put it another way, “We’re too old to be this stupid.”

I was having lunch not long ago with two guys I’ve known since grade school and one said, “I hope I haven’t offended you” and the other said, “We’re too old to take offense, we’re eighty for gosh sakes.” It’s true: we’ve reached the age of gratitude at last, no more time for anger.

I believe that in 2024 the American electorate will start to wise up to the sort of performance-art politics of the T.C. sort and decide that public servants should serve the public good by dealing with actual problems.

California, Nevada, and Arizona did not deal with the Colorado River emergency by painting a verse on the walls of the Grand Canyon, “All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.” Nor did they curse the problem. They agreed on a (temporary) solution.

And if, on a scale of one to three, you give this column a two, I’m okay with that. Let’s go be wise and forgive Texas for its doggone stupidity and do unto others as we would have them do unto us. You kids stop hitting each other or I am going to send you to your rooms and I mean it.

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CheerfulnessIn Cheerfulness, veteran radio host and author Garrison Keillor reflects on a simple virtue that can help us in this stressful and sometimes gloomy era. Drawing on personal anecdotes from his young adulthood into his eighties, Keillor sheds light on the immense good that can come from a deliberate work ethic and a buoyant demeanor. “Adopting cheerfulness as a strategy does not mean closing your eyes to evil,” he tells us; “it means resisting our drift toward compulsive dread and despond.” Funny, poignant, thought-provoking, and whimsical, this is a book that will inspire you to choose cheerfulness in your daily life.**Available in Softcover, eReader formats and soon on Audible**

1. CHEERFULNESS

It’s a great American virtue, the essence of who we are when we’re cooking with gas: enthusiasm, high spirits, rise and shine, qwitcher bellyaching, wake up and die right, pick up your feet, step up to the plate and swing for the fences. Smile, dammit. Dance like you mean it and give it some pizzazz, clap on the backbeat. Do your best and forget the rest, da doo ron ron ron da doo ron ron. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, hang by your thumbs and write when you get work, whoopitiyiyo git along little cowboys—and I am an American, I don’t eat my cheeseburger in a croissant, don’t look for a church that serves a French wine and a sourdough wafer for Communion, don’t use words like dodgy, bonkers, knackered, or chuffed. When my team scores, I don’t shout, Très bien!! I don’t indulge in dread and dismay. Yes, I can make a list of evils and perils and injustices in the world, but I believe in a positive attitude and I know that one can do only so much and one should do that much and do it cheerfully. Dread is communicable: healthy rats fed fecal matter from depressed humans demonstrated depressive behavior, including anhedonia and anxiety—crap is bad for the brain. Nothing good comes from this. Despair is surrender. Put your shoulder to the wheel. And wash your hands.

We live in an Age of Gloom, or so I read, and some people blame electronics, but I love my cellphone and laptop, and others blame the decline of Protestantism, but I grew up fundamentalist so I don’t, and others blame bad food. Too much grease and when there’s a potluck supper, busy people tend to stop at Walmart or a SuperAmerica station and pick up a potato salad that was manufactured a month ago and shipped in tanker trucks and it’s depressing compared to Grandma’s, which she devoted an hour to making fresh from chopped celery, chives, green onions, homemade mayonnaise, mustard, dill, and paprika. You ate it and knew that Grandma cared about you. The great potato salad creators are passing from the scene, replaced by numbskulls so busy online they’re willing to bring garbage to the communal table.

I take no position on that, since I like a Big Mac as well as anybody and I’ve bought food in plastic containers from refrigerated units at gas stations and never looked at the expiration date. And I am a cheerful man.

I rise early, make coffee, look out at the rooftops and I feel lucky. Today is my day. Other people, God bless them, go see their therapist. I never did. What would we talk about? I enjoy my work, I love my wife, my heart got repaired years ago so I didn’t die at 59 when I was supposed to. My dream life is mostly very chipper, sociable, sometimes I’m hauling crates of fish along a wharf in the Orkney Islands, one Orker bursts into song and we all sing together, me singing bass in a language I don’t understand, and I’m rather contented in my sleep. Why should I argue with gifts? A therapist would turn this inside out and make it a form of denial. It isn’t. I’d tell her the joke about the man walking by the insane asylum, hearing the lunatics yelling, “Twenty-one! Twenty-one!” and he puts his eye to a hole in the fence to see what’s going on and they poke him in the eye and yell, “Twenty-two! Twenty-two!” and she’d find a hidden meaning in it but there isn’t one, just a sharp stick. I’m not going to talk about my father because he’s dead and one does not speak ill of the dead, they are waiting for us and we will join them soon enough, meanwhile I feel good and thank you very much for asking. Sometimes, in church, when peace, like a river, attendeth my way, I feel actually joyful, I truly do.

I used to be cool and ironic and monosyllabic and now I’m a garrulous old man who’s about to lecture you about the importance of good manners (YAWN) and cheerfulness especially in grim situations such as 6 a.m. on a dark February morning standing in an endless line waiting to go through airport security and a TSA sniffer dog is walking along the line giving it a prison-camp feel and sleepy people toting baggage are waiting and the old man recalls pre-terrorist days when you walked straight to your gate, no questions asked, and he feels—well—sort of abused. And then a teenage girl walks past the checker’s booth to the end of the conveyor belt to put her stuff in the plastic bins and her lurching gait indicates some sort of brain injury. She seems to be alone. She also seems quite proud of managing in this situation, emptying her pockets, adopting the correct stance in the scanner, stepping out to be patted down by a TSA lady who then puts an arm around her and says something and the girl grins.

It’s a beautiful little moment of kindness. The cheerfulness of this kid making her way in the world. It reminds me of my friend Earl, who is 80 like me, who visits his wife every day at her care center and takes her for a walk, which cheers her up despite her dementia; he keeps in touch with his daughter who struggles with diabetes and an alcoholic husband; Earl is an old Democrat who is critical of the cluelessness of the progressive left when it comes to managing city government and law enforcement; but despite all this, he is very good company on the phone, never complains, savors the goodness of life.

I talked to Earl the night before the 6 a.m. line at Security and I think of him as I watch the girl collecting her stuff at the end of the conveyor. She feels good about herself and this strikes me as heroic.

So when I hear a woman behind me say, “This is the last time I fly early in the morning. This is just unbearable” (except she put another word ahead of “unbearable”), I turned and said, “Did you hear about the guy who was afraid of bears in the woods.” She shook her head. “His friend told him that if a bear chases you, just run fast, and if the bear gets close, just reach back and grab a handful and throw it at him. The guy says, “A handful of what?” “Oh, don’t worry, it’ll be there. It’ll be there.”

“Oh for God’s sake,” she said, and then she laughed. She said, “I can’t believe you told me that joke.” I said that I couldn’t believe it either. She said she was going to Milwaukee to see her brother and she intended to tell him that joke. So we got into a little conversation about Milwaukee. She said, “Have a nice day,” and I said, “I’m having it.”

It was not always sunshine and roses with me. I grew up in a small fundamentalist cult where the singing sounded like a fishing village mourning for the sailors lost in the storm. I spent years in a sad marriage eating meals in silence and wrote stricken verse and long anguished letters, had a couple brain seizures that made me contemplate becoming a vegetable, perhaps a potato, but recovered and finally realized that anguish is for younger people and now was the time to pull up my socks, so one day, having exhausted the possibilities of tobacco after twenty years, I quit a three-pack-a-day chain-smoking habit simply by not smoking (duh)—a simple course correction, the lady in the dashboard saying, “When possible, make a legal U-turn,” and I did and that turned me into a certified optimist. Smoking was an affectation turned addictive. I stopped it. A powerful deadly habit thrown overboard. I thought, “You have a good life and be grateful for it and no more mewling and sniveling.” I have mostly stuck to that rule.

Life is good. Coffee has taken great strides forward. There are more fragrances of soap than ever before. Rosemary, basil, tarragon, coriander: formerly on your spice shelf, now in the shower stall. I bought pumpkinseed/flax granola recently, something I never knew existed. Can rhubarb/radish/garbanzo granola be far behind? The slots in your toaster are wider to accommodate thick slices of baguette. Music has become a disposable commodity like toilet paper: the 45 and the CD are gone, replaced by streaming, which requires no investment. Your phone used to be on a short leash and the whole family could hear your conversation and now you can walk away from home and exchange intimate confidences if you have any. The phone is my friend. I press the Map app and a blinking blue dot shows me where I am, and I can type “mailbox” into the Search bar and it shows me where the corner mailbox is, 200 feet away. I already knew that but it’s good to have it confirmed. The language has expanded: LOL, FOMO, emo, genome, OMG, gender identity, selfie, virtual reality, sus, fam, tweet, top loading, canceled, indigeneity, witchu, wonk, woke, damfino. I come from the era of Larry and Gary and now you have boys named Aidan and Liam, Conor, Cathal, Dylan, Minnesota kids enjoying the luxury of being Celtic. Girls with the names of goddesses and divas, Arabella, Aurora, Artemis, Ophelia, Anastasia. We have the Dairy Queen Butterfinger Blizzard if you live near a Dairy Queen. Unscrewable bottle caps—no need to search for a bottle opener (once known as the “church key,” and no more). Shampoo and conditioner combined in one container. The list goes on and on. We have Alexa who when I say “Alexa, play the Rolling Stones’ ‘Brown Sugar,’” she does it. I can get the Stones on YouTube but then I have to watch a commercial for a retirement home, a laxative, and Viagra. And the tremendous variety of coffee cups! We used to get coffee cups as premiums at the gas station, all the same pastel yellow or green, and now we have cups with humorous sayings on them, Monet landscapes, the insignia of your college, an Emily Dickinson poem, you choose a cup that expresses your true distinctive self. We didn’t used to be so distinct.

I am no role model, my children. I have the face of a gravedigger, I get less exercise than a house cat, my water intake is less than that of a lizard, I am a small island of competence in an ocean of ignorance, I have three ex-girlfriends who wouldn’t be good character references, and yet I feel darned good, thanks to excellent medical care. I avoided doctors with WASPy names like Postlethwaite or Dimbleby-Pritchett and ones whose secretary put me on Hold and I had to listen to several minutes of flute music. I chose women doctors, knowing that women have to be smarter to get ahead in medicine. And what Jane tells me is that your most crucial health decision is the choice of your parents and I chose two who believed in longevity so I am a cheerful man and walk on the sunny side and meet the world’s indifference with a light heart. I put my bare feet on the wood floor at 6 a.m., pull my pants on, left leg first, then the right, not holding onto anything though I’m 80 and a little off-balance and if my right foot gets snagged on fabric it’s suddenly like mounting a bucking horse, but I buckle my belt and go forth to live my life. I’m a Minnesotan and have my head on straight so I get to the work I was put here to do. Some lucky nights I am awakened at 3 or 4 by a bright idea and I slip out of bed and put it on paper. When COVID came along, I accepted it as a gift and we isolated ourselves in an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan like Aida locked in a tomb with her lover, Radamès, but with grocery deliveries, and Lulu our housekeeper came on Tuesdays.

A pandemic is a rare opportunity for a writer: I sat in a quiet room, nowhere to go, nothing to do, and I spun two novels, a memoir, and a weekly column. Most of the gifted artists I knew—musicians, actors, comedians—were out of work, whereas I, the writer of homely tropes and truisms, was busier than ever. The audience for a white male author is smaller than the state of Rhode Island but my writing is improving and I’m happy about that. My aunt Eleanor said, “We are all islands in the sea of life and seldom do our peripheries touch,” which surely was true during the pandemic but my island and Jenny’s often brushed peripheries and that was highly pleasurable and then of course there is the telephone.

I accept that I’m a white male though I don’t consider it definitive any more than shoe size is. I’m of Scots-Yorkshire ancestry, people bred to endure cold precipitation. Give us a whole day of hard rain and we feel at home. We are comfortable with silence and when we do speak, we utter short sentences rather than gusts. We aren’t prone to weeping though I sometimes do in church when it strikes me that God loves me. And when the woman I love sits on my lap, her head against mine, and says, “I need you,” I am moved, deeply. I don’t hurl brushfuls of paint at a canvas or compose a crashing sonata or write a long poem, unpunctuated, all lowercase, but I am moved. I knew I needed her but you can’t assume it’s mutual, so hearing it cheers me up. I don’t question her about the specific needs I satisfy, abstract theory is good enough.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Sage of Concord, the Champion of Cheerfulness, wrote back in the days of slavery when the beloved country was breaking in two:

Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it well and serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. Nothing great is achieved without enthusiasm.

For this and much more that he said, Emerson is the true father of his country, not the guy with the powdered hair and the teeth made of ivory and whatnot. All he said was “I cannot tell a lie” and that is simply not true. He was lucky in war, kept his mouth shut because of his bad teeth, and served as president before there was investigative journalism. I’d say he was the great-uncle of his country, maybe the stepfather. When I saw his picture next to Lincoln’s on our classroom wall, I thought he was Lincoln’s wife and not all that attractive.

When my daughter was 18, I went to prom at her school and stood in the gym with other parents as our kids processed in, boys in suits and ties, girls in prom dresses, the beams overhead and the tile walls all gay and glittery with banners and baubles, and a local rock band of codgers my age struck up “Brown-Eyed Girl” and our kids went wild, laughing and a-running, skipping and a-jumping, just like the song says, and we parents sang, “You, my brown-eyed girl, do you remember when we used to sing, Sha la la la la la la la la la lah de dah.” And then “So Fine” (My baby’s so doggone fine, she sends those chills up and down my spine). Old men with historic Stratocasters playing for our kids songs from my long-ago youth, the lead guitarist almost bald but with a slender gray ponytail like a clothesline coming out of the back of his head, playing his four or five good licks with great delight, and then My heart went boom when I crossed the room and I held her hand in mine.

This was a school for kids we once called “handicapped,” now we say “learning challenged” or “on the spectrum” but when the music played they were all equal in the eyes of the Lord. I went to public school: you stood on the corner, you boarded the bus, it took you to school. This school is one that each of us parents searched desperately for as our child sank into the academic slough. Many of the kids in the gym look as ordinary as you or me, and others are a little off-balance, quirky movements of head or arms, a speech abnormality. My heart clutches to see them dancing and I remember how shitty we were to kids like them when I was their age, it was so uncool to be seen with them and they never went to school dances, and here they were, ecstatic, including a girl injured as an infant who’s blind in one eye, walks with a lurch, one arm semi-paralyzed, and she was dancing like mad, and it struck me that jumping around on the dance floor these kids don’t feel there’s anything wrong with them. They are completely transported. Van Morrison didn’t write “Brown-Eyed Girl” as a therapeutic exercise, but here they are, dancing with abandon, and Grandpa Guitar is happy too, the wild boogying of oddballs a vision of paradise, and when the slow Father-Daughter dance struck up, I took my girl in my arms and I sang it to her, I feel happy inside, it’s such a feeling that my love I can’t hide, Oooooo.”

That’s my vision of cheerfulness. You get some hard knocks in life but you still dance and let your heart sing. I didn’t get knocked as hard as those kids did and any despair I feel is simply grandiosity: get over it.

My girl is a hugger and snuggler like her mother and when I put my arms around her I feel I’m hugging my aunts, who are all gone, and my mother, though she was a shoulder-patter like me. I never hugged my dad except as a small child. When my girl was three, I took her to visit my dad who lay dying in the house I grew up in, the house he built in a cornfield in Minnesota in 1947, and he was delighted to see her. He moved a foot under the blanket and she reached for it and he moved it away and she grabbed for it and it got away again. She laughed, playing this little game. She was my best gift to him, his last grandchild. He was 88, I was 55. My father who’d been through miserable procedures in ERs and said, “No more” and was waiting to die and he was pleased as could be by the laughter of a little girl. She was delighted by him. And now I’m delighted to see her dancing to the grandpa band at the prom in the gym. God is good and His lovingkindness endures for generations.

I come from cheerful people. John and Grace kept a good humor and loved each other dearly. When Dad went into a luncheonette he always made small talk with the waitress: Looks like we’re finally getting spring. We can use the rain, that’s for sure. Boy, that apple pie sure looks good. You wouldn’t happen to have some cheese with that, would you? Apple pie without the cheese is like a hug without the squeeze. The little chirps and murmurs, the sweet drizzle of small talk. He spoke it well. Mother adored comedians, Jack Benny, George Gobel, Lucille Ball. My parents courted during the Depression, married in ’37, went through the War, built a house in the country, had six kids whom Dad worked two jobs to support while Mother cooked and cleaned and slaved in the kitchen every August, canning fruit and vegetables from a half-acre garden, the pressure cooker steaming, her hair damp with sweat, and I cannot remember them ever complaining about the unfairness of life or envying the privileged who bought their produce at SuperValu. Sometimes she said Darn it or Oh, for crying out loud.

Mother did not encourage complaint—“Other people have it worse than you,” she said, referring to children in China. She also said, “If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Which eliminated journalism as a career.

She admired FDR and Eleanor because they cared about the poor. My dad felt that the WPA was relief for the lazy, We Poke Along. Their difference of opinion never got in the way of their love for each other. Sometimes I’d find her sitting in his lap, the parents of six kissing. He was a little sheepish, she was not. Once I found a sex manual titled Light On Dark Corners in their bedroom and though it was dense with euphemisms, I understood that my parents lay naked in bed and did stuff, and I hoped to emulate this someday, whatever it exactly was.

I feel good in the morning, especially since I quit drinking in 2002. (The way to do it is to do it.) I have a clear head and I light a low flame under the skillet and think of the chicken as I crack the two eggs but when I fry the sausage, I don’t think of the pig. The egg is a work of art; the sausage is a product. As a young man I wanted to make art but I didn’t want to work in the academic factory to support my art, so I chose to do radio, which is a form of sausage. I admire the egg but I enjoy the sausage more. And it makes me feel cheerful, a good thing at the start of day before mistakes accumulate. My life is a series of mistakes. It’s cold in Minnesota so I went into radio because it’s indoors and vacuum tubes gave off heart. I set out to write humorous fiction à la Thurber and Benchley and S.J. Perelman did who were like the uncles I wished I had. I didn’t write serious fiction because that’s what I’d been forced to read by teachers and it had a penal quality about it. I made these big decisions based on no information and they turned out well. I’ve enjoyed lavish freedom to do homespun narratives sponsored by Powdermilk Biscuits and the American Duct Tape Council and talk about the poet Sylvia Plath who was full of sorrow and wrath and the day that she dove headfirst in the stove, she should’ve just had a warm bath—and if it was a modest enterprise, well, it was my own choice.

I have a dark side. I do not believe in regular exercise; I believe that an exemplary healthful lifestyle makes it more likely I’d be struck by a marble plinth falling off a facade as I walk to the health club. I can’t define “plinth” but I know it would kill me. I am quite cheerful staying home and I get my exercise reaching for things on high shelves.

My Grandma Dora sang me to sleep with “Poor Babes in the Woods,” lost in a snowstorm: “they sobbed and they sighed and they bitterly cried, and the poor little things, they lay down and died”—not a song Mister Rogers ever sang. Grandma did not tell us to look the other way when she chopped the head off a chicken. Death was a part of our lives. Not many children today have observed a beloved relative swinging an axe and a headless chicken flapping around on the bloody ground. I have. You must be aware of death to fully appreciate the goodness of life.

I learned cheerfulness from my folks. They had known hard times and now having a home, a garden, a car, gave them pleasure, and they savored it. I grew up in the Fifties, when my shyness led some of my aunts and teachers to imagine I was gifted. Actually I was autistic, not artistic, but autism hadn’t been invented yet, so I had the advantage of ignorance and by the time I learned what the problem was, it was too late for remedial ed, I was in my forties, a published writer with a popular radio show.

I was born with a congenital mitral valve defect that killed off two of my uncles in their late fifties. They simply dropped dead. Had I been born thirty years earlier, I’d be dead too. The defect kept me off the football team, spared me from brain injury, and the hometown paper hired me, at age 14, to write sports and I did my best to make a mediocre team valiant in print, thus my disability opened the door to a career in fiction.

I was lucky to live in Minnesota, a state proud of its numerous colleges and its homebred writers like Sinclair Lewis and Scott Fitzgerald, proud of its work ethic and Lutheran modesty and the call to public service and not so keen about euphoria so there was no reliable criminal element to supply dope, everything we obtained in college was substandard and diluted, the hashish was full of mulch, the cocaine was half talcum powder, the cannabis smelled of Maxwell House, the mushrooms were no more hallucinogenic than Campbell’s soup, so I didn’t experience euphoria until I was 45 and had two wisdom teeth extracted and was sedated and given painkillers, a dreamy experience. If I’d experienced it when I was 21, it could’ve sent me spinning into thirty years of rehab. But at 45 you know enough to know that real life is preferable to having a headful of golden mist.

In my twenties, I considered the idea of dying young and becoming immortal like James Dean in his sports car crash or Buddy Holly in the little plane in the snowstorm or Dylan Thomas drowning in drink, dying on their way up in the world, no sad decline into middle-aged mediocrity. Maybe this morbid thought came from my Scots heritage. Bluegrass comes from Scottish balladry, songs about dying bridegrooms and the bride taking poison at the burial and throwing herself into his grave. That sort of song.

Scotland is where golf comes from, a game that shows us the worst aspects of ourselves, potato-faced men in yellow pants riding electric carts in search of a white ball in tall grass and whacking it into a body of water and cursing God’s creation and then sitting in a clubhouse and getting soused on mint juleps and complaining about the income tax.

Thank God, I realized that immortality is no substitute for life itself. I missed an opportunity at early death in 1962 when, on a straight stretch in Isanti County on a two-lane highway, I got my ’56 Ford up to 100 mph and a pickup truck suddenly eased out of a driveway up ahead and onto the highway. In a split second, I swerved to go behind him and it was a good choice—he didn’t see me and try to back up—otherwise he and I would’ve been forever joined in a headline. Anyway I’d done nothing worth immortalization, just introspective stuff—“He looked out the window and saw the reflection of his own pale face against the drifted snow. She was gone. Like everyone else.”—A few years later I almost died young again when I bought a king-size mattress from a furniture warehouse and tied it to the roof of my car with a piece of twine and it blew off as I drove home on the freeway and I pulled over and ran back to rescue it and a big rig blew past me blasting his horn. A memorable thing, the Doppler effect of a semi horn doing 70 a few feet away. In 1983 my brother Philip and I canoed into a deep cavern in Devil’s Island on Lake Superior, attracted by the dancing reflections on the cavern ceiling and paddled way in until we couldn’t go farther and then paddled out, just as the wake of an ore boat a mile away came crashing into the cavern, waves that would have smashed us to a pulp and instead we sat in the canoe and watched the waves pounding into the cavern and said nothing, there being nothing to say. And eventually I turned 50, which is too old to die young. Whenever I relive those close-call moments, all regrets vanish, all complaints evaporate. I survived to do hundreds of shows and when the audience laughs it feels like a good reason to go on living.

And I’ve come to relish writing more and more especially after the Delete key was invented, which ranks with Gutenberg’s movable type in the annals of human progress. Back in the typewriter age we had liquid white-out but Delete enables you to remove whole pages of your own gloomy nonsense. I gave up dark writing for the simple reason that it fails to hold the interest of the writer. It’s boring.

Gloom is just like carbuncles:
Yours is the same as your uncle’s
Whereas the hilarious
Is wildly various
Like the wildlife found in the jungles.

I left Minnesota and friends and family in 2018 after Minnesota Public Radio, fearful of a shakedown scheme by two former employees, threw me out in the street, a miserable mistake on their part, and at 76, I needed to put it behind me and so we took up residence in Manhattan where I enjoy anonymity and Jenny loves the city and our daughter is nearby, so it was a smart move all around.

And when I stood in that gym watching her and my fellow autists leaping and dancing to the hits of my youth played by a man with a rope coming out of his head, it was so happy it made me cry just as I do in church when we sing about the awesome wonder of the world and the stars and the thunder O Lord, how great thou art and we old angsty Anglicans stand and raise our hands in the air at this Baptist revival hymn, we the overachievers transformed into storefront charismatics. It’s quite a sight. It happened one morning with the chorus, And I will raise you up, and I will raise you up, and I will raise you up on the last day.

It was Easter morning, brass players up in the choir loft, ladies with big hats, and when the clergy processed up the aisle, the woman swinging the censer looked like a drum major leading the team to victory over death. Resurrection is not something we Christians talk about in the same way we talk about our plans for retirement, but it’s right there in the Nicene Creed and in Luke’s gospel the women come to the tomb and find the stone rolled away and the mysterious strangers say, “Why seek ye the living among the dead?” This all hit me when we sang, “And I will raise them up,” I raised my right hand and imagined my long-gone parents and brother and grandson and aunts and uncles coming into radiant glory, and I was surprised by faith and I wept. My mouth went rubbery, I couldn’t sing the consonants. I stayed for the benediction, slipped out a side door onto Amsterdam Avenue, and headed home. Without the Resurrection, St. Michael’s’d be just an association of nice people with good taste in music but when it hits you what you’ve actually subscribed to, it can blow your head off, me the author standing and weeping among stockbrokers and journalists and lawyers for God’s sake.

This never happens at meetings of the American Academy of Arts & Letters up on 155th Street, writers and composers and painters and architects do not stand, singing, moved to tears: it simply does not happen. It happens at St. Michael’s on 100th Street. I don’t know if they do this at All Souls Unitarian over on the East Side, I think maybe they think about doing it, but hymns about inclusivity and tolerance and justice that leave Divinity out of it except as a beam of light or a rainbow or a starry sky—I’m sorry but that doesn’t make New York adults raise their arms and weep. The Lord is great indeed. He is here among us, from the public housing projects to the castles of Central Park West, amid the honking and double-parking of delivery trucks, God is here and we are His, we of the Academy and also kids on the spectrum, jumping and dancing. This cheerful thought can get you through some dark days. My mother knew deep grief when she was six years old, a little sister died of scarlet fever, and soon after, her mother died, and Grace lost the memory of her mother, couldn’t recall her voice, her manner, stared at snapshots of Marian trying to bring her to life, and it makes me happy to think of them reunited in happiness. There endeth my sermon. Go in peace.

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I was a big shot at one time, which I knew because when I went to work at the office, twelve people suddenly got very busy. I had a popular radio show and I pulled the plug on it not wanting to become a living legend, a last connection to broadcasting’s past when music came on big black vinyl discs and everyone had an ashtray on their desk.

I left Minnesota because there were so many middle-aged people there who loathed the sight of me because they’d been forced by their parents to listen to my show on long car trips and I was afraid one of them might throttle me so I moved to Manhattan where I felt very safe. Now my office is my kitchen and it’s just me and the coffeemaker and the toaster, and eventually my sweetie walks in and says, “What are you doing up so early?”

Doing the same thing I did when I was important. I do a sort of ventriloquism in which I talk in the voice of old relatives who are all dead, but the voice is in my head, and as long as I keep using it, I keep them alive. I also stay sane. Twitter is not part of my world, I am not an influencer, I used to drive under the influence but don’t anymore.

I interrupted writing for a while today to have a Zoom meeting about estate planning with a couple lawyers in Minneapolis and for a discussion centered on my own demise it was a lot of fun. We laughed a lot.

They mentioned “legacy” and I laughed. What legacy? There’s no such thing. Scripture promises resurrection but it isn’t specific about the form we’ll take, whether vegetable, mineral, gas, or spirit, meanwhile here I am on a sunny day in New York, sitting at a café on Columbus Avenue and watching the passing humanity, the great variety of gaits, brisk and propulsive, ambling, toddling, sidewalk surfing, window shopping, touristy uncertainty, geezerly gimpiness, and the aimless shuffle of people like me whose heads are full of irrelevancies.

What’s on my mind is family history, the seven children of James Keillor and Dora Powell, and in all of Manhattan there’s not a single soul who has the slightest interest, nor should there be. Heredity, the streaks of tragedy, the guarded secrets, a family of good gardeners and Bible believers, sworn to modesty, dry humor, intensely loyal.

My dad once drove up to Anoka to see his brother Lawrence who was president of the First National Bank. I asked him if he had an appointment. He said, “I don’t need an appointment, he’s my brother.” And when he got to the bank, Lawrence put everything aside and they sat down and talked. That was my family in a nutshell.

James was not a good farmer. He’d go out cutting hay, holding the reins in his right hand and a book in his left. He was of another world. Dora was a schoolteacher and demanded that we make the grade. I’m descended from them, careless and ambitious at the same time. I sit in the café eating salad and remember going to Lawrence’s where he and Dad and Eleanor sat around the piano and sang “It Is Well with My Soul” — “in our ancient ruined voices,” Eleanor said, and that was the end, within a few years they were all gone.

I’ve been telling stories all my adult life and this is one that mystifies me: where did we come from. My shelves are packed with books I’m no longer interested in but I had a dream last night in which I visited James and Dora on their farm after the house burned down and saw their seven kids and little Eleanor had a terrible fever and the family sat praying for her — a fleeting dream but I would give anything to revisit it. I feel the same way about the picture of my mother, 17, with sister Elsie and friend Dorothy, three girls in summer dresses standing holding their bikes by Lake Nokomis in 1932, so happy — I want to ask her, “Do you realize you’re going to have six kids and not much money and they’ll cause you a lot of problems? Is this really what you want? I’m a writer, I can send you to Hollywood. You’re very charming, very funny. What he loves about you, millions of others would love too. What do you say, kid?” And she gets on her bike and wheels away.

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I hear from back home that the wretched winter has concluded and the trees blossom and people are allowing themselves to think about resuming normal life though of course Minnesotans know that winter, like COVID, can return at any time and as it says in Ecclesiastes, “What has been is what shall be. One generation comes as another departs. We shovel the walk and the wind blows the neighbor’s unshoveled snow over us, making our labor meaningless. It is what it is.”

It’s not a sunshiny view of life but it serves us well, the stoical It Could Be Worse perspective. Yes, we’re flabby, uncool, discouraged, not flossing regularly, our mental acuity is somewhat diminished from when we were in the eighth grade, we can’t remember passwords, we need a paring knife to try to pry NyQuil out of its tight plastic pods, but at least wild bears are not rampaging across Minneapolis, snarfling up small children. The Mississippi still flows south. We have not been invaded by Wisconsin. The yellow goldfinches come to the feeder. The ducks swim in the pond. The frogs are croaking at night. It stays light later and later. Nobody I know has been caught paying hush money to a porn star.

Life is good. Sex is less frequent than when we were young and couldn’t keep our clothes on for more than an hour; now we make love only on birthdays and anniversaries if there is a full moon and the Twins are ahead in the eighth inning, but it’s all the more pleasurable for being rare. It’s like Paris that way: if you lived there you’d just be complaining incessantly the way the French do, but a biennial visit can be marvelous.

Fishing season opens, which gives men a chance to eat bad food, go without bathing, pee outdoors, and sit in a boat for hours and be monosyllabic, but misery makes for good company as I recall from back when I went to political fundraisers. I’m a Democrat and at our events you wind up standing in a bunch of people talking about economic injustice or declining test scores in secondary ed.

Not what I’d call a fun evening. Trump’s success is simple: entertainment. He knows his crowd and tells them what they want to hear: the system is rigged against them and it’s time to overthrow the government. He says stuff you never heard in high school civics class and it’s thrilling. They get to whoop and yell for revolution, knowing this is theater, only intended to terrify Yalies and Times columnists and the book club ladies.

I went to a Trump rally in New Jersey last week. I wore a fake moustache and dark glasses. I loved it. He came out collecting donations — for a hundred bucks you get a degree from Trump University and a round trip on Trump Air. He was raking it in. He yelled, “You people are dumber than stumps. I may be a mad hatter but you have the brains of a box of hammers. You couldn’t find your way home if you were standing in the driveway. Without me, you’d be hopeless.” And he pulled out a pistol and fired into the crowd and a fat man fell down dead and the crowd cheered. “See what I mean? I knew you liked me,” he said. I never saw a candidate do that before.

I read that younger and younger people are now going around with hearing aids and is it any wonder, what with the world clamoring for their attention as they turn up their headphones to shut out the clamor and now baseball, our sacred national pastime, is employing DJs to make rock ’n’ roll racket to engage people who get bored sitting through the outs, waiting for a grand slam.

Nonetheless it is spring, the trees blossom, birds sing, some things remain the same. I saw neighbor kids waiting on the corner for a ride Saturday evening, she was very elegant in a ball gown and he wore a tuxedo and was trying to make conversation. I wanted to warn them about vodka, that it can go down very easily and then be painful coming up, but why would they listen to an old man? I hope they like each other. Friendship is a good start for romance, better than the zing of the strings of your heart. And now I miss my sweetie, far off in Minnesota. She’s the butter on my bagel, the syrup on my toasted waffle. I count the days until she returns.

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