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We went to see Richard Strauss’s “Salome” at the Metropolitan Opera Wednesday night, or let’s say that my love went and I went with her, she because she loves opera and I because I don’t know enough about opera to be critical, I like everything just fine. But this opera was different. Men do not come off well in “Salome,” you’ve got King Herod for one thing and Salome’s dad who is weird and scenes with lewd men and little girls that make you not want to read the subtitles. There are men wearing ram’s heads and John the Baptist chained in the dungeon and more mental illness than in most operas but it’s in German. The music has its dissonant edges but it’s gorgeous, played by the 100-piece Met orchestra. So you have weirdness and insanity set to beautiful music, Salome wandering around singing “I want to kiss his lips” after the prophet’s head has been chopped off. There’s no intermission so it’s hard to leave early.

I went to see it, in part, because my friend Ellie Dehn was covering the role of Salome in this production. “Covering” means that she learned an extremely difficult role with a lot of crazy acting and was no more than 15 minutes from the Met before each performance and was focused and ready so that if the star soprano got out of a cab and was run down by a pizza delivery guy on a bike, Ellie would rush in, put on the white gown, and do the show, hit the high notes, be insane, do the Dance of the Seven Veils, so that nobody would feel cheated. It’s an impossible job, to be up for a heroic performance, knowing that the odds of your doing it are slim to none, but the roles have to be covered. Baseball postpones, parades cancel, opera doesn’t.

The performance started a little late, which gave me hope that the star had maybe twisted her ankle and I imagine Ellie coming out and being insanely great and get eight bows and wow the opera world, go on to star as Lucia and Lady MacBeth, a great career for a girl from Anoka, Minnesota, but no, it was not her night. She stayed home and did the crossword.

The opera ends with three big chords, whomp whomp whomp, and the curtain comes down and the audience lets out a roar, the principals take bows, the prophet and the seductress get the loudest ovations, she takes hers and comes downstage to acknowledge the prompter in the box who has been shouting cues at everyone all evening, and the crowd heads for the exit, stunned, most of them, whereas for me, the ignoramus, it was just another festive evening among a fascinating crowd, most of them younger than I. Grand opera is hip in New York, there’s a definite gay presence, and some people like to dress up, maybe dramatically, do daring things that draw attention, weave beads into their hair, wear a flashy frock, bare the chest, glow, glitter, but not at “Salome” — when a saint who foretold the coming of the Savior is beheaded, even New Yorkers show restraint.

We flowed out onto the plaza, a chilly May night, people were dazed, even I was, we’d seen something stupendous even if we didn’t know what. My beloved led me uptown, her eye out for a taxi, ready to fight off competing operagoers, even as she poured out her complicated feelings of dazzlement, depression, disgust, delight, which I’m sure is what Strauss intended. It was 1902, he could see where the 20th century was headed, and now here we are in the 21st. We have our own Herod, a crueler one, more corrupt, not satisfied to behead one prophet but ambitious to destroy whole institutions, defy courts, indulge his vanity while creating chaos wherever he goes.

Someone could write an opera about him. Herod in love with the interior of a 747 that is outmoded and unsecure. Congress rushing to approve cuts to Medicaid in the middle of the night, a program that 40% of rural kids depend on. A top Cabinet official, asked to explain “habeas corpus,” says it’s a provision in the Constitution that gives Herod the power to deport whomever he wishes. Strauss dealt with serious insanity but our Herod may prove that farce is more dangerous. I don’t want to know. I won’t buy a ticket.

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I buy my groceries at a gigantic market a few blocks away, owned by some billionaire, don’t know which one or his views on Palestine or if he was at the inauguration or how good a seat he got, I just buy his potatoes and 2% and granola, but the other day I was at my doctor’s a mile away and stopped at another market in the chain and it was quite a different scene. My market is on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and the doctor is on the Upper East. The UE is a young neighborhood of mothers with strollers, the UWS is the domain of grandmas with walkers.

The East branch has things I haven’t seen in the West, such as glass jugs of milk from pasture-grazed cows bottled on the farm and eggs from homing pigeons who get at least an hour of vigorous exercise per day. Vegetables grown in non-pesticided soil fertilized by B.S. collected at Ivy League graduate schools.

What surprised me was the checkout section. At the West market, 26 checkout persons wait by their registers and a herdsman aims you toward the next available. At the East, there are a dozen self-checkout stands and two checkout persons for us elderly and mentally arrested. Thinking that surely a U of M college grad could meet this challenge, I stepped up to the plate and set my three potatoes on the scale and something about the instructions for pricing made me hesitate and an employee nearby yelled, “You need help?” in a tone of voice I would describe as accusatory, not helpful, and I stepped over to the handicapped area and was checked out by a nice person. And in that moment I entered the category of Persons of Special Needs.

I heard a ding in my phone. A digital woman named Priscilla told me to pick up my bags and go to the door. She alerted me to cracks in the sidewalk, the approaching curb, an available cab. She said, “His name is Frank and his last traffic violation was for an illegal U-turn in 2006.”

The world is changing and advanced medical care is going to keep us old honkers around to the point where the world will be weird and we’ll wander around in it like pigeons in a plaza. The English language will flatten under the ministrations of AI and robot buses will transport us and driverless cabs, security cameras will watch us all day and on the first of the month we’ll get a bill for $545 for jaywalking, which we’d done all our lives and are too old to change. At the dentist’s, two mechanical arms guided by laser vision will clean the teeth and fill the cavities and if you doze off and an arm accidentally removes your left nostril, well, you signed the release form. AI surgery can repair the heart, remove tumors, do chestectomies and clototomies, eyelid lifts, butt tucks, shoulder shaping, lap lightening, and automation will lower the price so you’ll meet your cousin Bob six months from now and he’ll look like a new piece of work, the seams visible but nobody will comment.

I brought my groceries back home and put them away. The billionaire had sold me two cucumbers that’d gone soft in the course of shipment from Mexico: Priscilla told me it was my responsibility to check produce for freshness. But the two ears of sweet corn looked good, wrapped in plastic, so I put a pot of water on to boil.

“It’ll boil faster if you put a cover on the pot,” said Priscilla.

I didn’t know how to turn her off so I put her in the medicine chest and closed the four doors between her and the kitchen, and meanwhile the water came to a boil and I put in the corn.

Two minutes later I took it out. It was good. It had no taste except for the butter and salt but it brought back the memory of sweet corn fresh from a field. Evidently ICE had held up the shipment at the border to search for explosive ears. But it brought back the memory of sweet corn and that’s good enough for now. I’ll be in Minnesota in August. Get an Uber driver to take me down 52 to the closest sweet corn stand, take two ears back to the hotel. Microwave them with the husks on, ask Room Service to send up butter and salt. I’ll be a happy guy.

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I’ve often thought that we Midwesterners are the most compliant people on Earth, trusting to the point of accepting insult with a smile, and I thought so again on Sunday when I got the most painful massage of my entire long life. It was at a spa at the airport; I had two hours before my flight, so I signed up for a half hour and lay on a table for sheer bare-knuckle torture. It was deep to the point of being invasive. He may as well have been walking on me with hobnail boots. If I’d had nuclear secrets, I’d have handed them over, the formula for winning lottery numbers, the whereabouts of Amelia Earhart, the origins of the universe, but I lay there not saying a word, not even “Pardon me but could you not attempt to rearrange my bone structure?”

Having been brought up evangelical, I thought maybe this was payment for some transgression but couldn’t think of one except that I’d accidentally taken Jenny’s suitcase instead of my own and so she had to go to a drugstore and buy toothpaste and a toothbrush and borrow clean underwear from her sister. And then the guy bent my right arm back behind my back so hard it made me squeak, and because I need my right arm to sign checks and shake hands, I got off the bed. I did not say, “That was an agonizing massage and I’m going to report you for abuse of the elderly.” I said, “I have to catch my flight.”

I could hardly turn my head. My back hurt. I couldn’t walk straight. I will say this for myself: I did not give the man a tip. I do not reward vicious cruelty.

Where does this wimpiness come from? I’d like to blame my parents who brought us up not to complain, but they were children of the Depression when everyone was living on the edge.

No, I think that, like many people from flat terrain, I simply grew up with a strong sense of my own insignificance that has lasted into my 80s. I lay there under painful punishment for 25 minutes. A New Yorker would have jumped up after 90 seconds and called 911 and filed charges of assault.

I once lost a truckload of money on a real estate scam that I won’t tell you about because you’d only say, “How could a grown person buy into something so obvious? If you’d asked a lawyer, he’d have said ‘Are you kidding?’ and charged you 59 cents for the advice.” If I told you, you’d inform my wife that I need to be put under guardianship and all my PIN numbers taken away.

It’s not blind trust so much as “Who am I to imagine I’m so important that anyone would bother to cheat me?”

And so the good Christian people of the Heartland went ahead and elected the most corrupt and contemptuous president in our 250-year history. Unlike Nixon, he does it openly and boasts about it. He’s the man who never told a joke or made fun of himself or petted a dog or put his arm around a friend who wasn’t bought and paid for.

Hillary Clinton was a good candidate but she lacked a favorite sport and if she had bowled and hit a strike and leaped in the air, and screamed, “Yes!” she’d have won Wisconsin and the White House and we would’ve been spared DeeJay in the yellow pants, but never mind.

Despite my dumb mistakes, I believe in progress. I once put up for five years with a shower knob so calibrated that by turning it an eighth inch you went from Arctic waterfall to fiery brimstone. You had to stand under the showerhead to adjust the knob, not knowing if you’d perish by ice or by fire. But eventually a plumber replaced it. Life goes on. The sun comes up and the sun sets and the Mississippi runs into the Gulf and you can call it whatever you like, it’s the same Gulf. This evening I banged my head on a cupboard door, which I’ve done before and surely will again.

Flannery O’Connor said, “Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.” I did a radio show for forty years based on the world I grew up in, which is gone, and now I’m grateful for life itself, its significance yet to be determined.

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I went to Mayo for some tests this week, a clinic that always puts me in a cheerful mood, even at 6:30 a.m. when the 9th floor receptionist said, “Good morning” and really meant it, and a young woman in blue scrubs led me into a dressing room, where I stripped down to socks and shoes, donned two hospital gowns, was led to a little room full of electronic gizmos and wires and screens, lay down on a cushioned examining table, was IVed and oxygenated, by two women in blue and one of them, Lindsay, laid a warm blanket on me and it was very moving. When you’ve spent the night using powerful laxatives to clean out your insides, this gesture of hospitality is meaningful, and before the doctor stepped in, we fell into friendly conversation as if we’d gone to school together, though they were young enough to be my granddaughters. It made me feel the future was bright. And then, running a magic anesthetic through the IV, they made me disappear.

It was a procedure in which tubes with tiny cameras are poked into your body from both ends, but it was not much more dramatic than a haircut, and there was no bad news after, and all was well.

Years ago, I made my pilgrimage to Mayo, the Lourdes of the North, the Court of Mortality Appeals, and Dr. Dearani installed a new mitral valve in my heart so I didn’t fall prey to the family heart defect and no obituarist at the Daily Planet had to take inventory of my life (“His books were easy to read and contained very few serious grammatical errors.”). Modern medicine has given me 24 years more than Aunt Ruth and Uncle Bob and Uncle Jim got who died in their 50s from the same mitral valve prolapse I have. I remember Grandma sobbing, her shoulders shaking, at Ruth’s funeral, her oldest daughter. But Mayo repaired me nicely and now I’m one year younger than Grandma when she died.

I’ve been rather lucky. I’ve known what I wanted to do with my life since eighth grade when I got a copy of A.J. Liebling’s The Road Back to Paris and read it in an evening and decided I wanted to be a writer. I still do. I went to college so I’d have a good answer for when people asked me, “What are you doing?” I majored in English to become a writer, which is like majoring in physics so you can sail a boat. One cold winter, looking for indoor work, I got a job announcing on a classical music radio station, and I managed to refit my Minnesota accent to sound educated, a great benefit. You can’t hang a degree around your neck but you can learn to sound smart.

Grandma heard me read the noontime news once and said, “It doesn’t sound like him. It sounds like an older man.” Aunt Jo said, “That’s how they talk on the radio.” Grandma listened closely. She heard me introduce a suite with a French name by Maurice Ravel and was impressed by my pronunciation. She would’ve preferred I’d gone into teaching, like her, but at least I had a job.

Through pure serendipity, it led to “A Prairie Home Companion,” which you know all about, and now I’m an old stand-up comic who walks around in the crowd and does a 90-minute set:

God tells us to be righteous but still He

Tells us to lighten our hearts and be silly.

Live in the moment, this moment, here with you, right now,

And let cruelty and stupidity disappear somehow.

It is spring, there is a turn in the weather,

And as George Frideric Handel wrote, let us sing together.

 And I hum a note and they pick it up and we all sing:

Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hal-le-lu-jah.

And then again. They’re surprised at how good they sound. And on it goes from there, some thoughts on the beauty of old age, some stand-up, poetry, stories.

An individual, as we know, is capable of doing great harm, and my aim is to show that one person can make 600 people happy for 90 minutes. And that’s how I hope to justify Mayo’s doing miraculous things for me. You don’t get a new heart valve so you can go play golf, I say. Make yourself useful. Grandma would approve of that. She had high standards and I’m still trying to measure up.

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I flew to Duluth Saturday to an enormous hockey arena to watch my tall handsome grandson in his black robe and mortarboard walk forward and accept his college degree and what made the long trip and the boring ceremony more than worthwhile — essential, imperative — was to witness the delight of his girlfriend, Raina, sitting next to me in the high bleachers, her focus on the processional during “Pomp and Circumstance,” her cry of “There he is!” and out came the smartphone for video and as he crossed the stage to get his degree, she whooped and yelled and hopped up and down and so did I.

More important than a college degree is the love of a good woman, and seeing this elegant funny well-spoken willowy woman in the long dress in love with him and he with her — I would’ve gone to Alaska to see it, Auckland, Tuscaloosa, Turkestan.

A circle of Ojibwe drummers beat and chanted before the procession, very thrilling after the obligatory announcement acknowledging that this had once been their land — but what mattered was the reverence of the chanting and the power of the drumming, interpret it as you will. To me it stood for the spirit of these young lives, our prayers for them, setting forth into a technological jungle, a perilous trail beset with profound confusion, fascist tides that have elected a deranged president not once but twice, and the ever-present odds of tragedy and suffering, but the drums urge us onward, onward, don’t look back. Next to that, “Pomp and Circumstance” is a tea party under a striped canopy.

Thanks to hockey-arena acoustics, the speeches were almost entirely unintelligible, not so much English as the burbling of pigeons and chittering of squirrels, with words like “journey,” “accomplishments,” “discovery,” and “curiosity,” and the whole sentences I heard might’ve been composed by an older AI-powered speechbot but it didn’t matter, the day wasn’t about the bigwigs but about us, and video cameramen circulated among the Class of 2025 and their close-ups were flashed on a big screen and people whooped and screamed when they saw their graduate.

My graduation back in medieval times had no video, we just sat and listened to the college president say he was proud of us — his intelligence was as artificial as most college presidents’. I wasn’t proud of myself; my scholastic experience was highly mediocre. I went to college in order to avoid getting a job I’d hate, such as dishwashing or parking cars. I knew what I hoped to do with my life — had known since the eighth grade — and for the most part I’ve succeeded at doing it for the past sixty years but the college degree and the career were two separate entities having little to do with each other, like granola and granite. Or vermicelli and Vermont.

In Duluth I sat through the mind-numbing reading of names and my mind drifted toward the dark side, college pals who got locked in comfortable jobs and couldn’t get out, friends who got entangled with alcohol and drugs, the tragedy of cousin Lynn who stopped at a stop sign, the sun in her eyes, and entered the highway to be crushed by a truck, Corinne who dove in the water with pockets full of rocks, the tragedy of Freddie who loved all living things and crashed into the stone wall of depression, cousin Roger who dove into deep water to impress a girl forgetting that he couldn’t swim, and then Raina cried, “Here he comes!” and there he was, approaching the stage.

He was a new man, not the Charlie I had known. Under his black gown he wore a suit and tie. He wore black shoes. His wild hair had succumbed to a barber. He’d been a camper and canoeist, an outdoorsman, and now he was a model for Nordstrom’s or a candidate for Congress. Raina rose and Charlie’s mom and aunt and uncle and me the old guy and his name was spoken and the words “Graphic Design” whatever that may mean, and we let out some wild whoops like a goal had been scored in the closing seconds and the trophy won.

A moment later she said, “Let’s go meet him” and we descended the stairs to the concourse and there he was. She flew into his arms and he held her close and there’s the story. Lord, thank you for your generosity. True love in the midst of pomposity.

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Fame is fleeting, especially semi-celebratedness is, as I know very well from my own experience, and that is exactly as it should be. The earth spins around the sun, the constellations pass by, tall trees fall in the forest, their trunks chewed by chipmunks, and Johnny Larson, once the emperor of late-night TV, is now a small footnote, Walter Contrite, Dave Caraway, all gone, and in my category of fame, Men of Letters, there is no such thing as true celebrity anymore, no Hemingways, no Frosts or Tennessee Williamses, just Caramel Cream, Cashew Crunch, and Cocoa Delight. I am Vanilla.

Fifty years ago a writer could set out to write about the weekly doings of a small Midwestern town, and so I did, but now you need dragons or vicious criminals or diaphanously clad ladies swanning around as described by artificial intelligence. I am a back issue.

I accept this. I embrace it. I had my day. That day is past. Now and then a woman in her late 60s leans over and says, “My dad was a fan of yours” and I thank her. But last week, while changing planes at MSP, walking from Concourse B to F for a flight to LaGuardia, I heard a flight attendant say, “Prairie Home!” and wave to me, a guy edged up at Caribou Coffee and said, “I grew up on you,” a filmmaker said he liked my work, and this little flurry made me appreciate the tremendous kindness of people, going out of their way to make an old man feel important.

The old world passes but there is always a place for kindness. I am of a generation confused by the Great Electronic Leap forward and this makes it possible for the young, even small children, to show us the way, and Lord, do they gladly step in and do it. I stand at the counter trying to figure out where to place my Visa card to make the reader beep and a skinny kid of 15 or so with wild hair and a cryptic T-shirt reaches over and helps me. This is beautiful.

“Thank you very much,” I say. He grunts. Someday he may say, “You’re very welcome.” Or maybe characters don’t say that in the fantasy graphic novels he loves, but nonetheless kindness is kindness. Instead of hostility (“Get out of the way, douchebag, and let a normal person through.”), he made it easy.

I remember after a famous fashion model died in a horrible crash, the story in the Times said, “Though she was famous as a fashion icon, she was also well-known for how deeply she cared about her friends and family.” The she was also well-known leaped out at me as perhaps the kindness of a copy editor who wanted to put a flower on the casket. It touched me. How do you testify to kindness? What evidence do you offer? You just say so. She was a great beauty and she had a good heart.

As a favor to a friend, I let myself get talked into going to his house one Saturday and hanging out with thirty of his Creative Writing students over wine and cheese. I don’t necessarily approve of Creative Writing courses, I might prefer Correct Composition, but I was 20 once myself and so I hung for five hours and it was awkward at first but I knew what I needed to do: recognize each of them as an equal and a colleague. So we didn’t talk about our previous work, we talked about what we were working on now, their ambitions, and I confessed some of my regrets and offered advice about things that didn’t exist yet, and they felt honored, and it was a kindness.

The place to witness kindness is on the streets of Manhattan. Deadly delivery bikes go racing past through red lights and every step you take you witness acts of kindness toward the old and small children and pets and if anyone should fall, or falter, or show alarm, arms will reach out. The American people are among the kindest on God’s green earth. If you think otherwise, you really need to get out more often and look around. We are a beautiful people saddled with a sleazebag president but he is fading away and soon we will see ourselves more clearly. The gentleman has lived an insulated life on golf courses and high floors of buildings and guarded limos. This is a great country. Go out and enjoy it.

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May is here and we only get one a year and a person needs to go outdoors and take a deep breath, walk away from the news, which rubs our faces in the angry arrogant pointless presidency of a bonehead, and walk in the park and observe the delight of kindergarteners leashed together like sled dogs, heading for a grassy lawn to be unleashed and go dashing around, yelling, laughing, New York apartment kids thrilled by freedom of movement, running in circles, playing tag, hiding behind trees. And the tulips are in full color and food trucks are grilling brats and street musicians are strumming and drumming and the world is joyful.

I grew up among solemn fundamentalist men and their dutiful wives, and though Scripture mentions joy they avoided it themselves, but we kids found it by chasing each other, skipping stones on the river, shooting baskets, skating, daredevil bicycling, and in May joy is hard to suppress, especially in the north, you walk down the street with a root beer float and smell new-mown grass and observe girls in summer dresses and hear “I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day” sung to a rhythm track and you realize that delight is a necessity, our sanity depends on it. Whatsoever things are lovely, think on those things, said the apostle Paul and so I put away the paper and go for a walk in the park and look for little kids and there it is. God did not put us here to be insulted and tormented, and live under malign corrupt leadership.

It happened to be the day the bonehead printed in his Truth Social a photoshopped pic of himself in a pope outfit and proposing himself as a candidate. This was a couple days after he returned from Pope Francis’s funeral in Rome where he scored a front-row seat and so the coffin of the saintly Francis, the “people’s pope” with the scuffed shoes who brought the Church to accept the blessing of gay couples, was upstaged by a convicted felon who is busy cutting billions and billions from medical research and humanitarian aid to desperate people.

His appearing in pope attire so soon after the funeral achieved a level of tastelessness beyond anything he had done before and late-night comics who’ve been feasting on him for years were confused by it — how to satirize a man who satirizes himself so expertly. Hitler took himself seriously — he thought his postage-stamp mustache and the upward flung salute were meaningful, but here’s this pathetic palooka maneuvering the U.S. Army into staging a big parade with tanks and jets on his birthday, a level of childishness every other president in our time would’ve avoided at all costs. Meanwhile his pal Cardinal Dolan says about the pope photo, “I hope it wasn’t his idea.” Someone ptuies in your face and then does it again and you think, “I hope that was an accident.”

The man is a gross insult to every living American citizen, he has made us a nation of nincompoops in the eyes of the world, and yet most of his voters are still behind him. They are writing a new chapter in the history of mass delusion. Every morning the news hits us like a baseball bat. How did this crook and clown achieve the White House so he could wage war on science, higher education, the Constitution, regulatory agencies, and the world economy, while redecorating the Oval Office to look like the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas.

There are two intelligent, principled Republican men who know they have turned a blind eye and hung on too long and watched a cruel dumbbell turn Lincoln’s party into a fascist cult. They are Mike Johnson and John Thune. They know the man up close and personal: he is a dreadful joke. They need to bring themselves to do their duty and oppose him. The man is a coward. He’s shown it over and over again. Stand up to him and he will fold like tissue paper. The Constitution provides the remedy. Impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors. Bribery is one. The man’s crypto scam is a pipeline for bribes.

Remove him from office and let us begin the long process of restoring the honor of our country. The world needs America and when we elect a brazen blockhead to power, we put the entire planet in danger.

This country’s ideals cannot survive this man’s term of office. It’s just that simple. Republicans have served up a cowpie for supper and they must take it away.

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I board the plane at LaGuardia where everything goes well until I reach TSA and a uniformed woman asks if I have any metal implants in my body and I say that I do. “What do you have?” she asks. I want to say, “German shell fragments from the Battle of Ypres. General Haig sent us across muddy fields directly into point-blank Austrian artillery. A horse collapsed on me and saved my life and I alone am left to tell the tale.” But I say, “Pacemaker” and she directs me to a gentleman who gives me a full-body pat-down the same as if I were being deported to El Salvador, and I am cleared to go to MSP instead.

Delta Air Lines signs along the passage tell me I am soon to get the “Me Time” that I deserve and meet the flight crew that will Feel Like Friends and receive Nourishment for the Soul, but coming from the Midwest I doubt this. An airliner is not a recovery center.

I take my seat, 3A, and please don’t tell me I have no right to a wide ride, I admit that I am privileged. No doubt a worthier person sits in back but there’s no time for sworn testimony and cross-examination. It’s only a two-hour-thirty-minute flight so suck it up, worthier person, and take out your resentment in a fine work of fiction that might put your kids through college.

A click on the P.A. and a calm manly voice: “This is your captain up in the cockpit. Welcome ––” and so forth. It is brief, has a factual ring, we’ll be flying 505 miles per hour at 34,000 feet, nothing about his feelings of awe at taking responsibility for all of our lives or the state of his spiritual journey, and absolutely no attempt at friendship. He sounds like a Midwesterner to me, steady hand, keen eye, someone who can fly into haze without trepidation, well-trained, no outsize ego. That is who I want at the controls, not the son of a wealthy developer from Queens who buys him a draft deferment.

I do not like it when the flight attendant reminds us that 2025 is Delta’s centennial and says, “I hope we’ll be around to serve you for another hundred years.” I doubt it. I’m 82. Why would my descendants be shipping my ashes around? Say it ain’t so.

I especially don’t like her saying, “Flight attendants, arm the doors for departure.” Have things come to such a pass that we need machine guns to fly over American territory? Is there a revolving turret on the roof? Why have I boarded this plane?

I have boarded it in order to spend a week with my beloved who is engaged as a violist in an opera orchestra in downtown St. Paul, performing Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” at a hall across the street from the park with the statue of Fitzgerald. Downtown St. Paul is in sad shape, like so many downtowns these days. Dayton’s Department Store is gone. My mother loved Dayton’s, run by a good Presbyterian family, and clothed her six kids in clothing with the Dayton’s label, following Paul’s admonition to the Philippians: “Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are of good report; think on these things.” But Dayton’s was supplanted by Amazon as prophesied in Revelation, that “a great red dragon with seven horns and ten heads will come among you,” and downtown is a mirage but I believe that great art can change the world and that it isn’t Required that Novelists be Drunks and I intend to sit in the hall and look down on the stage as Figaro sings “Largo al factotum” and see my lady in the pit, viola under her chin, making music.

I love the woman and I will take any risk to fly to Minnesota and see her and when the Count falls in love with young Rosina whose elderly guardian Dr. Bartolo intends to marry her himself and his man Figaro conspires to bring Rosina and the Count together and the old goat is frustrated and true love triumphs, then I swear there will be hope for downtown again.

We need downtowns; a website is not a center. You can’t build your life around drive-up windows. There is delight in Rossini not found in a mall. Fitzgerald didn’t need to act like a writer: he was one so push the gin away. Art is good enough. Find yourself a good barber like Figaro and tell him what you want and prepare to be very fortunate.

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The Supreme Court is taking up the case of right-wing Christian parents who don’t want their schoolkids to be assigned to read storybooks in which gay persons are portrayed as normal, which reminds me of my childhood when my parents wrote to school asking that, for religious reasons, I be excused from gym class for the unit on dancing. So for two weeks, while other students did square dancing and ballroom in the gym, I sat in study hall and did my lessons.

As I recall, it was no big deal. I didn’t feel odd or set apart or estranged. I snuck off to some school dances and found that dancing to Little Richard, the Coasters, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, was pretty free-form, not the waltz or foxtrot or mambo they taught in gym. I saw no moral wrong in bopping around on the dance floor with a girl. I was 17 and becoming my own person.

America has an old tradition of accommodating minorities. My ancestor John Crandall immigrated to Boston in the late 17th century, preached in the streets, was set upon by angry Puritans, and escaped to Rhode Island where he felt welcome among the Baptists. Quakers found homes in Pennsylvania. Mormons were persecuted in Illinois and made their way to Utah. I live in Manhattan where I see some kosher groceries. The list goes on.

I have idealist friends who wish to shield their kids from a materialistic acquisitive status-conscious conformist culture and so choose to homeschool the kids and live in the woods and not own a TV and discourage exposure to social media. I wish them well though I feel that isolation has its own perils but I do not express an opinion.

My parents believed they were doing good by keeping me off the dance floor but I’d suggest that history class was a more dangerous enemy, which omitted Divine Will from the story of civilization, and also science, which omitted Him as well. I know plenty of people who grew up in strict religious homes and who managed to relax their faith in adulthood, even erase it. Evangelicals who became humanists.

I am part of the shrinking population of churchgoers and I sympathize with my neighbors who prefer to sleep late on Sunday, drink coffee in their pajamas, read the Times and bitch about the stupidity in high places, do the crossword puzzle, and figure out a three-letter word for “self.” I do not feel superior, walking up the steps to the sanctuary in my suit and tie, taking a bulletin from the usher, putting my offering in the basket, and kneeling in the pew. I do not feel proud to be there. Don’t imagine God putting a checkmark by my name. I am aware of my shortcomings. I could list them for you here but there isn’t enough room.

I join my voice to the voices around me in the hymns and prayers and the creed. We praise our Creator and acknowledge His love and give thanks for His gifts, His endless goodness. All week I’ve been walking around inside myself and this hour on Sunday morning is when I disappear and feel joined to the world around me. I think tenderly of those I love and I also pray for my enemies. This is the heart of my faith: love, kindness, charity, sitting with head bowed in a beautiful quiet corner of the biggest busiest city in America, in a Jewish neighborhood, a block north of a Hispanic Catholic church, a Buddhist temple and a Muslim temple and Hindu temple within walking distance, in a city where same-sex couples are a common sight, and I pray for those whom I need and love. Religious doctrine does not cross my mind, not even a wisp or whisper. I feel lightened, lifted, buoyant. We sing the closing hymn, our hands raised on the chorus, “And I will raise them up on the last day.”

I slip out of the pew, I give a fist bump to the deacon who read the Gospel, I thank the priest for the good word, and I head out into Manhattan and walk home. I pass the Hispanic church, parishioners gathered around a priest. I pass the Korean Baptist church. A jerk on a Harley goes blasting past down Columbus Avenue. A chopper full of tourists goes overhead at low altitude, chopchopchopchop, and I send them a silent message: “New York is not about rooftops, it’s about people. Walk around. Maybe come to church.”

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