Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 3

I am a happy man in love for many years with one woman who is from my hometown, who grew up a stone’s throw from my high school but was only three years old at the time, so I had to marry someone else while I waited to meet her as an adult. We are happy together and contented and though we disagree on numerous matters such as oatmeal (I love, she loathes), we live in harmony because I acknowledge that she is probably right. It isn’t the oatmeal I love but the brown sugar and raisins.

She loves Bruckner and brooks no disagreement on this. Alka-Seltzer disgusts her; I consider it a cure-all. She is dedicated to her book club and isn’t shy to express her frank opinion. My only book club is Sunday morning at St. Michael’s and because it is THE book, we hesitate to question it. Her church is Central Park and she’d be happy to visit it daily. She is delighted to be in a group of people and mixes easily and is curious; I take a while to warm up and sometimes don’t and stand apart and wait to escape.

She did not take my name when we married because why would a person give up the name Nilsson, meaning “Victory of the People,” symbolizing triumph attained through effective action. “Triumph attained through effective action” sums up my wife pretty well, so when she says to me, “Don’t keep looking for that, it isn’t here,” I know it isn’t here.

She knows me so well that she can find things I’ve lost: she can imagine where I’d have put them, silly though it be.

I am a descendant of Sanctified Brethren, a separatist sect who considered Lutherans worldly and forbade their children to play percussion instruments lest it lead to dancing and then to sensual longing and physical affection. My people were serious folk and I ventured into the field of humor to escape from the rectitude and breathe; to talk to a crowd and feel a wave of laughter is a profound pleasure and the audience seems to think so too.

Ms. Nilsson grew up in a family of violinists and pianists and she found herself in music. At the age of 16, she spent a summer at the Boston Symphony’s Tanglewood Music Center, playing in a youth orchestra, and the experience of learning the Rachmaninoff Symphony No. 2 set her on her life course. I am a writer, a loner, but she needs to be in alliance. Solitude can make her jittery; she is fully herself when she is in tune with others, looking at things, listening, walking in the park. When she attends a show of mine, she reads the crowd perfectly and afterward tells me exactly what worked and what didn’t and why. I don’t know anyone else who can do it so well. But I am good for her too. I scratch her back, I make her laugh. She is high-strung and she needs a low-key guy to play off. If we were both high-strung, the strings would snap and someone could get hurt.

My parents were low-key, my dad was taciturn, and I cannot recall a single long conversation I ever had with Daddy. I loved him but I had to set my own course. Mother adored him and tried mightily to keep us on an even keel, clean, fed, rested, busy. She was third youngest in a family of 13 kids and she liked orderliness. She was never angry, only briefly disappointed, but she recovered.

My love had an aunt, a brilliant woman whose mental illness worsened with age. My love was a main support to her in old age, saw her through dark times, and it gave her a warm heart for the suffering and off-kilter, on the streets of New York and also in Africa. She had a wacky grandma and a saintly one and a crazy bachelor uncle and as a freelance musician, she spent periods on the edge — she’s seen more of life than I have, by a long shot. After all these years I admire her more than ever and at the same time I like to hold her in my arms for long periods of time. We met in 1992 over lunch, which lasted for three hours and onward we go. Life is good, a bassoon next to a violist and, yes, it’s odd, but we found a way. It works.

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I did a show at Tanglewood in the Berkshires Saturday night, a big crowd on a beautiful day, and just before intermission someone told me that we had gone to war against Iran — and without mentioning the news, I asked the crowd to do me a favor — we live in feverish and fearful times, I said, and are a divided people and we need to hang onto the things we have in common such as our neglected national anthem, and they sang it, all four thousand of them, without accompaniment. It’s a magnificent song and they sang it from the heart and on “the land of the free” the sopranos sailed above us and it gave everybody something to think about.

I wish that General Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had stood behind the lectern and delivered the news of the B-2s hitting Iran with 14 thirty-thousand-pound bombs. If he had declared it a success and said that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been “completely and totally obliterated,” it would’ve been more convincing than hearing it from the real-estate developer from Queens. He posted, “A full payload of BOMBS was dropped” and a general wouldn’t have capitalized the word as if he were fond of the sound of it. You sort of felt Don was taking personal credit and hoped to build hotels in the craters. And when he said, “There’s no military in the world that could have done what we did tonight, not even close,” it was weird, coming from a draft dodger. General Eisenhower, after the D-Day invasion of Normandy, did not say, “No other military could’ve done what we did on Omaha Beach, not even close.” People who have seen battle are less likely to boast about it.

Like most Americans, I wasn’t enthused about joining a war in the Middle East. Nobody ever provided evidence that Iran was close to producing a bomb. China is a vastly more advanced military power but China is a business and businesses avoid bombing because the outcome is so unpredictable. Like most Americans, I am wary of Don’s ability to focus, listen to other opinions, and make long-term plans. There is not the confidence one would want in wartime. I live in a city of tall buildings crowded together on narrow streets and a Muslim theocracy bent on terror could cause great suffering in that city whenever it might choose. A president who is uncomfortable with liberal democracy and civil rights and religious tolerance might welcome an attack so as to declare martial law and cancel the midterm elections. I hear sensible people discussing this lunatic idea and it is troubling.

It is, however, good for my line of work, which is amusement and it was a fine evening at Tanglewood. People spread blankets on the grass and drank wine and laughed at most of the jokes (The old man walks into the Mermaid Lounge and sits at the bar next to a handsome young woman and says, “Do I often come in here?”) and they sang I Saw Her Standing There and You Are My Sunshine and some of Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus and listened to opera and Bach played on harmonica and Calling My Children Home —

Those lives were mine to love and cherish,
To guard and guide along life’s way.
Oh, God forbid that one should perish,
That one alas should go astray.

And after three hours, everybody went home. I admired the young families who brought little kids and sat out on the grass, and though I didn’t hand out questionnaires I had the feeling they wanted the kids to experience the pleasure of being in an audience, surrounded by humanity, enjoying things in common, an experience you cannot get from a screen.

Down the road from Tanglewood is Stockbridge, hometown of the liberal idealist Norman Rockwell, site of the Rockwell Museum and the paintings of the America we dearly want to believe in, the girl in the hall outside the principal’s office, who’s been roughed up in a fight, black eye, grinning — the cop and the runaway kid at the soda fountain — the Thanksgiving turkey — the working man standing up at a public meeting and speaking — the mother and her boy praying over their meal in a restaurant as other patrons look on. His art was snubbed by critics as sentimental, but so what — we’re a sentimental people, and we love these images and want them to be true. This is not a country that drops bombs for no good reason.

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Minnesota used to be a state where if a man with a badge knocked on your door at 3:30 a.m., you’d open it and after last week’s shootings we may be considering various alternatives. Do we all need to purchase firearms? Will Apple develop a cop-detector and Siri will tell you he or she is legit? Or maybe a tranquilizer dart you shoot with a peashooter?

Will legislators and other public officials make their addresses known? Will they need to serve under pseudonyms such as X12 or YME while housed in a secure cellblock facility? Will their children need to change their names and live with foster parents? My suggestion is that we hire Canadians to legislate and adjudicate; their country seems to be running well, why not import experts?

One thing is clear about last week’s MAGA attack: the shooter was not only off his rocker, he was also stupid. The press represented him as being in the security business, working for big companies, but actually he worked in a 7-Eleven. Somehow we imagined that he had worked out a devious plan, was probably holding a fake passport and carrying a bundle of cash, probably was on a flight to Albania even as the search went on, but no. After he shot the four persons, he went back to his home in Green Isle and hid in the woods where police found him. He was surrounded by SWAT teams and if he’d had a heart and a soul, he’d have put a pistol to his forehead and deleted himself, but instead he meekly surrendered and was taken into custody.

Two Trumpy Republican senators speculated that he was a Marxist but he wasn’t even a good marksman — shooting people at close range doesn’t require skill — and people who knew him well said, No, he was a MAGA man. He drew up a list of persons he wanted to shoot and left this incriminating evidence in a car at the scene. Now the state has to find a defense lawyer willing to defend a guy who, to borrow Trump’s words, is a sleazebag, a lowlife, a low IQ individual, and a pile of garbage.

Where will the state find a jury of twelve impartial citizens? I hope they don’t move the trial to South Dakota or Wyoming — a jury there would probably acquit the jerk if the president sent them an executive order.

Now we understand why the president didn’t call Governor Walz and express sincere sorrow at the shootings but had JD Vance do it instead. Sorrow is not a feeling that comes naturally to Mr. Trump. Bragging and insulting do but it’s hard to imagine him shedding a tear or even his eyes moistening. Asked Sunday morning if he would call Walz, Trump said, “Well, I may. He’s a terrible governor and grossly incompetent but I may call him.”

What sort of brain responds to that question with insults? Why not just say what you think, “Those Democrats deserved to get shot.”

The simple fact is that MAGA is the revolt of stupidity against education, science, government, the legal system, journalism, people who aren’t from here, people who don’t look like MAGGOTs; it has less to do with conservatism than it has to do with a cheese omelet. It’s a revolt fostered by the 94-year-old Australian MAGGOT Rupert Murdoch, whose loudspeaker tells the uneducated that the world has conspired against them and needs to be destroyed. Anarchy is what Murdoch has to sell and he’s been quite successful: it isn’t journalism, its cynicism, vandalism. The First Amendment gives Murdoch the right to spray-paint trash talk on the marble walls of government and now at last he has elected a vandal to spray them from the inside.

Federal charges have been brought, meaning the shooter could be eligible for the death penalty, which seems too merciful to me. Why not lifetime solitary confinement in a cell with a speaker on the wall broadcasting Trump’s three-hour campaign speeches nonstop 24 hours a day, the prisoner not allowed any cloth or paper to stuff in his ears. Let him wear wooden underwear and listen to His Greatness around the clock. I predict that dementia will set in after about six weeks and the man will be babbling, waving an imaginary pistol.

One dope can do an enormous amount of damage to a large population. Trump has demonstrated this and now his acolyte has too. What’s the answer? Kindness. Charity. Good manners. I apologize for this ugly column. I shouldn’t have written it. I promise not to do it again.

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Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, were shot and killed in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, a mile from where I grew up, where my dad built a house in 1947 and he and Mother raised six children. Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, were shot north of there in Champlin, across the river from Anoka where I was born. My nephew and his wife and kids live in the house Dad built and after the shootings they locked themselves in the house and tried to stay calm.

I sat in New York, watching state officials express shock, horror, resolve to catch the perpetrator, grief for the families, and I thought of the peaceful suburb I knew, houses on acre lots with big gardens, kids walking to school, the Mississippi a stone’s throw away, skating on it in the winter. And I felt that more needed to be said than shock and resolve.

We’re living in a strange time when violent rhetoric has come to be accepted in America, language that makes violence permissible: when you call your opponents scum, sleazebags, thugs, crooks, lowlifes, losers, nut jobs, sick, a total disaster, vicious, heartless, a pile of garbage, a joke, a fraud, pathetic, crazy, lying, disgusting, disgraceful, why is it so surprising that an armed man will go to his political opponents’ door and blow their heads off?

If someone walked up to you on the street and called you scum and a sleazebag and a lowlife, you would not be amused, you’d sense danger, you’d seek shelter.

Take yourself back to the Eighties and try to imagine President Reagan referring to Jimmy Carter as a sleazebag or a Communist. Mr. Reagan was an optimist who showed respect for his Democratic opposition — he had long been a Democrat himself — and he was a loving father to four children, including a liberal son Ron and a very independent daughter Patti. His race against Walter Mondale in 1984 was maybe the politest presidential race ever. You could take issue with the president on his Cold War policies, civil rights, AIDS, public education, etcetera etcetera, but the man himself, whatever his flaws, was an honorable public servant, a patriot, a man of warmth and humor, who carried himself with dignity and respect for his high office.

It simply can’t be denied that President Trump has brought a new level of animosity into the political arena. Back in Mr. Reagan’s day, Republicans might’ve referred to “my Democratic colleagues” or “my friends across the aisle,” but this fellow said, “If you vote for Biden, your kids will not be in school, there will be no graduations, no weddings, no Thanksgiving, no Christmas, and no Fourth of July!” Was he joking? Why aren’t we laughing?

Evidently a 57-year-old man considered two Marxist-Leninist state legislators to be vicious scum and a pile of garbage and so in the middle of the night, he put on a police badge, drove to their houses and shot them and fled and subjected the population of the Twin Cities and Minnesota to days and nights of wondering who might suddenly appear at their door, armed and dangerous.

In Minnesota, Mr. Trump’s approval stood at 43% before the shootings of the Democratic legislators and their spouses, less than Iowa’s 49% and Wisconsin’s 45, much lower than North Dakota’s 67, but I know enough Minnesotans, Iowans, North Dakotans, and Wisconsinites to say with confidence that 49% or even 43% are not in sympathy with the murder of political opponents or with the contemptuous language that opens the door to it. I told stories for years about a small town, Lake Wobegon, and its loyal churchgoing soft-spoken community-minded citizens, who valued modesty, respect for tradition, taking turns, good manners, charity to those in need, and though the stories were comic fiction, I believe they capture some fundamental truths about the Midwest. Half the population has allowed itself to be captivated by a spirit of vengeance and violence that is antithetical to their nature.

Fear is the favored force of evil, causing public officials to feel targeted, to see shadows in the hall, imagine the glint of gun barrels, back away from their principles. I’m tired of hearing it quoted but Edmund Burke was right when he said that all evil needs to be triumphant is for good people to do nothing and bite their tongues, not wanting to endanger their families. The shootings in Minnesota were an act of derangement and the president’s supporters need to face up to their complicity.

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I feel strangely elated about the Prairie Home Companion shows coming up this week, think they may be the best we’ve ever done, which is odd for an almost-83-year-old guy to think, plus which I’m a Minnesotan and elation doesn’t come naturally to us. We are a very calm people. But I had a phenomenal week of writing, thanks to my new discovery that 3 a.m. is prime time for me. There’s a crazy intuitivity at that hour. What some people hoped to get from hallucinogens, some of us get from lack of sleep.

So Wednesday night the gang takes to the Strathmore in Bethesda, Maryland, and Saturday night we do Tanglewood in Lenox, Massachusetts. I wish we were doing Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Bowl and the Minnesota State Fair, but maybe next year.

We have three great singers: Ellie Dehn, Christine DiGiallonardo, and Heather Masse, for whom I wrote three new verses for the Star-Spangled Banner (the audience will sing the old one), and some new verses for the Hallelujah Chorus, and for Ellie, a Met Opera soprano, I wrote new words for La donna è mobile and O sole mio. Music director Richard Dworsky gets to play opera, folk, country, Grateful Dead, and blues, plus sing the Rhubarb jingle. The blues harpist Howard Levy joins the band. SFX man Fred Newman will do his one-man Led Zeppelin impression plus Clair de lune played on a jackhammer and sung by ducks, and a great deal more. Erica Rhodes will talk about her tortured childhood trying to become Clara in the Nutcracker.

Tim Russell and Sue Scott return in a half-dozen roles. Guy Noir is in northern Canada trying to save a man who calls from a pay phone in the woods somewhere in the U.S. where he is set upon by an ex-girlfriend as he runs out of quarters. Dusty and Lefty look for Lefty’s love Evelyn Beebalo, guided by a sarcastic Siri on Lefty’s saddlephone. There are commercials for Bertha’s, the Catchup Advisory Board, Coffee, the Professional Organization of English Majors, Beebopareebop Rhubarb, and of course Powdermilks. I’ll do the news from the little town that time forgot and I’ll also get to sing Brokedown Palace and Calling My Children with the women and a song about sweet corn.

If I’d known it was going to be such a good show, I’d have lobbied for public radio to carry it, but NPR has moved on and I don’t know anybody in television, so we’ll just be thankful for what we have. I’m a happy man, out working the road, writing a last novel So Long, Wobegon, and I hope to inspire other octogenarians: it doesn’t need to grind to a halt, sometimes it can be better than ever. GK

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I was on a long car trip, Atlanta to Nashville to St. Louis to Chicago, doing my stand-up comedy act this week, and in St. Louis came the horrible video of the jetliner going down in Ahmedabad, crashing into the medical college, the pilot’s Mayday cry of “I have no thrust,” the horrific death toll, one passenger surviving, and I sat backstage at the club, asking myself, “Do I mention this tragedy?” It seems perverse to ignore it but sort of sanctimonious to mention it — and how do I do it? Say a prayer? Ask for a moment of silence. And how to make a bridge from the elegiac to the jokes, which is what the customers came for. So I went out and did my act. Life is precarious and so we should be grateful and I will show my gratitude by making people laugh.

I took up gratitude some years ago when Dr. Dearani at Mayo replaced a valve in my heart and I went for a walk down the hall the next morning, thinking about my aunt and uncles who died in their 50s from the same congenital malfunction. I had come to the end of my life expectancy and was operating on gift time. It had nothing to do with good diet and exercise, it was about fine technology. I’m a writer, I’m not sure I could sew a patch on a pair of jeans. And on that walk, I gave up satire and snark and the fine art of spitballing the pretentious solemnity of poohbahs and solipsists and turned to the adoration of competence and ingenuity and nobility. This is a good strategy especially during the reign of America’s first utterly corrupt president. Pay him mind and he will wear you out and make you feel hopeless about the country. I choose not to be.

I am ten years older than my grandfathers, thanks to blood thinners and drugs that keep me from falling face-first in the waffles and talking jibber-jabber. As Solomon said, the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong, the race is to those who took care to be born late enough to take advantage of scientific advances

I’m a lucky man, thank goodness for it. I have writer friends my age who’ve been stuck for years because their previous book was greeted by heavyweight critics as “provocative and profound,” “unflinching,” “lushly layered,” and “exquisitely crafted,” and what do you do for an encore? The most reviewers have said about me was “amusing yet often poignant.” That’s not a pedestal, it’s a low curb.

When I was ten, I rode my bike from our house in the country into downtown Minneapolis, pedaling past factories and warehouses and printing plants and through the red-light district to the great sandstone castle of the central library where I climbed the stairs past the Egyptian mummy in his glass case and a facsimile of the Declaration of Independence in another, up to the reading room on the third floor and sat devouring books and then writing bookish things on a yellow legal pad with a sharp pencil, thereby finding something that would make me happy for the rest of my life so far.

When I was 11, Dad took me on a drive to New York City. He didn’t want to but Mother made him. He went to visit friends of his from when the Army stationed him in New York and she sent me along as a ball and chain, believing that the father of six children had no right to go gallivanting halfway across the country for pleasure. I was dazzled by New York of course and also by the realization that my father the soldier had had a very enjoyable time in World War II. Other men did the fighting and dying and thanks to them, a man in uniform was treated as a hero in New York, even though he was only a mail clerk. This story fascinated me. A revelation of the injustice of life. Two men, same uniform: one dines out at the Oyster Bar and is petted by the waitress, one gets shot up on the beach at Normandy and goes home in a box. The luck of the draw.

I’m still lucky. All the more reason to show mercy to the less lucky. And to stand up in front of strangers and make them happy. Our country is in the throes of awful cruelty and we the grateful must rise up and defeat it.

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I am not surprised about the rift that occurred between me and Donald Trump, I always knew that his friendships are measured in months and though he said beautiful things about me, called me the Greatest American Writer in History, and he appointed me head of the Department of Government Empathy and I taught him how to tell a joke, which he had never done before, how to hug a small child without terrifying it, how to limit his use of the First Person Singular and try to Decapitalize Key Words and Phrases. I tried to talk him out of the 51st State, the Gulf of America, Alcatraz, the idea that opposition to Israeli policy is antisemitic. And so, for him to order my deportation showed poor judgment and I dropped the bomb and during Pride Month I showed pictures of Don and his Big Beautiful Bill. Everyone in the White House knew he had a boyfriend and suddenly they were in panic mode.

But unlike him, I have a life. I was in a cab on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan heading for a meeting and I told the cab driver 730 and he thought I said 73rd and stopped there and I knew it was wrong but my phone rang and it was my grandson who’d come to town with his girlfriend the day before and I was making plans with him on the phone while pulling out my Visa card to pay the cabfare and I opened the door, watching for fast electric delivery bikes in the bike lane and I got out, and realized I’d left my billfold on the seat of the cab and I yelled but a Harley roared past and my grandson was alarmed but I assured him I was okay and I stood there in bright sunlight, dazed, realizing I hadn’t asked for a receipt so I didn’t know the cab number and all my money was in the billfold, plus ID and credit cards, which was a shock but there was nothing to be done, and I called my wife and got voicemail and remembered that she was going to the Frick Museum on Fifth Avenue and 70th, and I headed that way.

It’s an odd sensation, to lose your money and ID and credit cards, and suddenly feel free and happy, a pedestrian like everyone else, and I got myself into a river of humanity, most of them younger than I, and got into Central Park and the Bethesda Fountain splashing and the statue of Alice and the Mad Hatter and the White Rabbit, and over to the Frick.

I forgot what the meeting was that I missed. I was alive in the moment on a summer day surrounded by happy people. I texted my love, “I’m outside, come and find me” and sat down to wait. I knew she was inside the mansion, a woman entranced by beauty and yet she married me, and why should she look at her phone with the Whistler portraits of tall ladies in long gowns, the Rembrandt self-portrait, the Corot landscapes, and Degas dancers, but there she was, smiling, and paid my way in, and I sat in a gallery looking at a painting of a happy girl and her dog, and wrote a poem:

They say life is short but actually it’s as long as it is.
And I wish I could be alone with you for months,
The time would go flying by in a whiz.
And my troubles would disappear all at once.

I’m done with nonsense. I have today to live
And to gaze at you, love, and not look away.
No time for foolishness. To you I give
My entire attention, what more can I say.

And then she returned from the upstairs galleries. “I’ve seen all I can see in one day,” she said. “I get overwhelmed.” So we made our way back through the park, heading for home on the West Side. Life is precious and one is all you get and why waste it on what makes no sense. Find what’s beautiful and moves you and be happy. I lost my ID but I still know who I am, I don’t consider Bill beautiful and Don is definitely antisemantic and the Ovular Office looks like a roulette parlor and the platinum hair is not a good look for anyone, regardless of sexual preference.

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June is here, the sun shines, the birds sing, and I feel the mood lift probably because we’re spending a week in rural Connecticut with no Times landing at the front door every morning. Ecclesiastes says, “Whoever increases knowledge increases sorrow” and that certainly has been true of the Times front page this year. With a very active adolescent president, it’s good to take a break to restore one’s belief in human progress.

Of course the country is deeply divided. This week the Supreme Court declined to take up Maryland and Rhode Island’s ban on AR-15 semi-automatic rifles, which are legal in most states. I don’t know anybody who owns one and if a friend of mine showed me his AR-15 I’d feel funny about him, same as if he showed me his collection of photographs of corpses.

I am old enough to remember riding in the front seat of my dad’s car, standing on the seat beside him as he drove at high speed on twisty roads. Exciting to me at the time but now I can imagine my violent death at the age of six and I am grateful for the seat belt. It was accomplished over the objections of libertarians who felt the government had no right to require restraints, but the restraints were required and though there may be Shakers in rural Maine who claim the religious right to fasten them behind their backs, not around their fronts, they’ve been accepted by 99% of us.

Tampering with smoke detectors in airliner lavatories is now illegal. It didn’t used to be. You used to board a plane and run the risk of a chain-smoker sitting beside you. Now smokers are lonely outlaws rejected by society same as cat stranglers or monument molesters. I don’t know any smokers myself. I was a two-pack-a-day man, addicted to the trinity of a cup of coffee, a typewriter, and a pack of Luckies, and I quit in 1982 by the simple method of not doing it anymore, thereby earning an extra decade, maybe more. An outstanding example of rationalism in my life.

But now I worry about the invasions of technology changing what it’s like to be young. I grew up near the Mississippi River, which my mother warned me not to go near, especially after my cousin Roger drowned, but she couldn’t enforce the ban, having five other children as she did, and I was a good liar, so it was easy to slip away down a dirt road and through the trees and across a ravine and there it was, the magnificent river, flowing down the middle of America, and me, wading into the rapids, thinking of maybe building a raft like Huck Finn’s, and floating toward Iowa, Missouri, and what we used to call the Gulf of Mexico.

Nowadays a boy would have a smartphone in his pocket and his mother could track him and she’d punish him by seizing the phone and the magnificence of the river would not compensate him for the loss of texting and he’d accept his loss of freedom.

I loved the river. Texting is all small talk, Whassup? Where you? I sat on a big rock, bare feet in the water, contemplating great questions: What is it like to be twenty-one or even thirty? And death — what’s that like? What would you do if communists made you choose between renouncing God and drinking a pitcher of warm spit? What would it be like to put your arms around a girl? I’d seen it done by older kids but never tried it myself. What would it feel like? Would we talk? Would I kiss her or should I wait for her to kiss me?

These great riverfront questions are what leads a person to take up writing as a means of self-discovery, and now I worry about chatbot applications giving a kid a quick shortcut to creating stories. Give the bot access to your email and tell it to make you a superhero worshipped by the girls in your class and out come 4,000 words in an accomplished format with dozens of personal references.

As I ponder this, my love has come in the house with her phone and a picture she took of a turtle in the yard. She has used Google Turtle Search to identify it as a snapping turtle. This knowledge causes me no sorrow at all but I do wonder what it’d be like to put my arms around her and so I do. And then I let go so I can write this last sentence.

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The world is advancing at a rapid pace and it’s hard to keep up. Last weekend, I learned about a liquid hand soap that smells like fresh-cut grass, an Earl Grey ice cream, and an app that when you snap a picture of a tree with your phone, it will tell you it’s a catalpa and the bird singing in it is a tufted titmouse.

Earl Grey is a tea, not an ice cream, just as Jim Clothes is what it is and would you make ice cream that tastes of perspiration?

But the tree and bird app strikes me as heading down a treacherous road. People go to college to study forestry or ornithology and if it’s all available on your phone, what will we do with all the buildings with the pillars in front? Turn them into Halls of Fame? Mortuaries? Probably there is an architecture app that tells you if the recess in a building is a nook, cranny, cove, crypt, carrel, or apse. Perhaps a medical app to examine people’s laps and say if they’re likely to collapse. With AI hovering in the wings, ready to simulate writing, probably a sixth-grade education will be enough for anybody. But sixth-graders playing football is nothing that millions of Americans will wish to watch. We may need to go back to public stonings for our entertainment.

My grandma dearly wanted to attend the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 so she could hear the human voice recorded on discs and ride the Ferris wheel, but now innovations come so fast that by the time you organized a fair, it’d be an antique show.

The ice cream shop that sold Earl Grey was on the main drag of Chester, Connecticut, a town that strives to look as Colonial as possible: no Walmart, no FedEx, no Apple store or Whole Foods, just a string of little craft shops and cafes. A hamburger is $15, to keep out the riffraff. You can buy artisanal lace curtains and handcrafted candles but for dental care you’d need to leave the 18th century and drive to a contemporary town.

I bought a cone with two scoops of vanilla. I’ve accepted my own vanillaness for years. Back in the Seventies when independence was in vogue, people wore buttons and badges and T-shirts with humorous or meaningful or symbolic inscriptions to demonstrate individuality, and guys I knew who’d once followed the Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy model, grew their hair down to their shoulders and wrote fractured poetry and attempted to be Buddhist. But they had to face the fact that good jobs for Buddhist poets are hard to find and you may spend your 20s living in your parents’ basement.

Not a good idea unless the parents are wealthy and own numerous homes and you can live in the basement of one they’re not occupying.

My parent weren’t wealthy and they were fundamentalists and I was brought up to keep my distance from unbelievers, so I was painfully independent through childhood and in my adult life I longed to belong to the majority. I loved popular songs, I adopted a dreamy liberal point of view, observed the Fourth, and went to ball games and stood with the others and sang the national anthem.

I went to a graduation ceremony in May and a soprano did the anthem in her key and we listened as she hit a high C on “free” and I realized I haven’t heard a crowd sing it since I was a kid.

Maybe people are put off by the rockets and bombs, I don’t know. But I believe America needs an anthem. So I’ve rewritten it. Wherever you are reading this, at the breakfast table or on a bus or in a cafeteria, I’d like you to sing it aloud, softly, to the tune you know quite well. Just do it.

O say, can you see

From the Florida shore

To the vast open plains

And the mountains of Utah,

From Yellowstone Park to Columbia Gorge

To the hills of Fairbanks

And the beaches of Maui.

And Washington’s halls and Niagara Falls

The beauty of forest and farmland calls,

O say, don’t you love this land you must save,

The land of the free and the home of the brave.  

It isn’t Woke, it’s not about America First, it is to some extent about Diversity in that the plains and the gorge and Fairbanks and Maui are distinctly different.

You’re welcome.

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The most infuriating website in the country is Amtrak’s and buying a one-way ticket from Manhattan to Old Saybrook the other day brought me to the verge of pulling out a pistol and blowing the laptop to pieces but I don’t own a pistol and there’s a decent novel in the hard drive, but I was seriously irked. But it’s good to be irked, good for the heart, good for the disposition. Calm is greatly overrated as an attitude. I’ve suffered from an excess of it for years.

The infuriation, of course, was my fault. I am a museum piece from back in the manual typewriter era, tapping on an Underwood, a handsome machine now found in antique stores and journalism schools in impoverished countries. I haven’t punched Underwood keys since I was in my twenties. I still like to take a good pen and a yellow legal pad and sit and write. I believe there’s a circuit between hand and eye that can produce sentences more elegant than the one I’m typing now on a laptop. But the laptop is my main instrument. I prefer it for its vast ability to Delete. Using the cursor I can gray out whole passages and poking the little red dot at the top of the file I could, if I wish, make thousands of words vanish from the world without a trace and never bothering anybody ever again. There’s something heroic about doing this. You can burn a paper manuscript but nobody ever does, they accumulate and turn yellowish and wind up in an archive.

Deletion is noble. Someday, if necessary, I wish to be deleted myself. There is a time to exit and if the body hangs on, then steps must be taken. I want my people to put me in a small room with a glass of Scotch, a pack of smokes, an audio of one of Mr. Trump’s three-hour campaign speeches, and a .38 pistol, and let that be the end of it.

The drawback of the laptop is its power to distract. A man is busy about the task of writing something sensible and useful and shining light into dark corners, and then succumbs to the temptation of sending Google into other dark corners, such as the mystery of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance and how much was Howard Hughes worth and did the Beatles sing on Ed Sullivan’s show or was it lip-synched and do Ukrainians consider themselves to be Russian and has anyone located the Ten Commandments and was Beowulf a real person and did Teddy Roosevelt kill any beasts on his African safaris or did he only pose with a rifle, and was J.D. Salinger happy after he vanished from public view, and is it true that Albert Einstein was unable to sail a small boat, and how soon as a rule do famous people become unknown.

Scripture says: “Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” This is the Buddhist side of the Christian faith. On the other hand, Scripture says, “All things work together for good to them that love God,” which has not always been true in my case. Perhaps my aims are not high enough. In church on Sunday, we sang, “Lord, lift me up and help me stand by faith on heaven’s tableland,” and I am not sure what, at 82, I hope to be lifted up to, other than to be a happy old man. A cheerful old coot who’s grateful for longevity and not wishing for immortality. Mother got to 97 in good shape but she did gardening, vacuuming, mopping, and used a washboard and hung heavy laundry on clotheslines, a better workout than what you get with pen and paper.

We live in a golden age of American journalism. Heroic work is being done on all sides, graceful, honest writing, sometimes wildly funny. The times demand it. The sheer corruption, stupidity, and arrogance at the top demand journalists be soldiers and I see bravery everywhere I look. I don’t do that sort of journalism but I admire it. I am simply a passenger on the train, a spectator at the show. The show is summer, the American people afoot, taking the sun, families gathering, their decency and good humor apparent for all to see. This age era is passing, a new one is soon to arrive. This piggish president with his lavish contempt for people does not represent us and he will be stopped.

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