Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 5

I stayed in an old hotel in Northampton, Mass., last week, one with a glass U.S. Mail chute running from the top floor to the lobby, a sweet reminder of olden times when guests might’ve sat at a desk in their hotel room and written letters with fountain pens on hotel stationery to friends or relatives, but now people text those messages so no letters fluttered down the chute and there it is, one more useless artifact just like you and I will be someday if we aren’t already.

I’m not nostalgic. I’m quite aware that back in those fountain pen days plenty of people were conking out from the congenital heart defect that Mayo surgeons fixed very nicely and also from strokes that anti-seizure meds prevent and I also know that people we call “special needs” were miserably treated as cattle and now a growing army of teachers and therapists are dedicated to creating humane programs to enable them to grow and thrive and live good lives. We have one in our family and her happiness makes me happy; I hear her talk about her busy day and her job and her friends and I say, “God bless America for its goodness to humans who could easily be shoved to the side.”

My grandma Dora, born in 1880, a seamstress and Western Union telegrapher and schoolteacher and farm wife, was progressive, not nostalgic. She came from abolitionist stock and was deeply disappointed that her dad wouldn’t take her to the Chicago Exposition of 1893 where she hoped to see the moving sidewalk, motion pictures, the Ferris wheel, and hear recordings of the human voice. Her heroes were George Washington Carver and Einstein. Grandma came to our house when she was 82, my age now, and she watched TV covering John Glenn’s ride in orbit around the Earth and Grandma said she was sure that man would land on the moon someday and she was sorry she wouldn’t be here to see it.

No, Grandma was definitely forward-thinking and wanted her descendants to get to work making a better world and I have a good idea which of my cousins she’d be most proud of, such as Matt and Michael who worked in medical engineering and my brother who worked to prevent nuclear waste pollution and Betty the psychologist and Richard the architect, and I assure you she’d not be bragging up her grandson the radio humorist. Grandma was not interested in show biz; she didn’t want to go to Chicago to see Little Egypt dance the “hootchie-kootchie” on the Midway. No, ma’am. Grandma wanted to see the wonders that the human mind could conjure up to make life better and longer and healthier.

I wish Grandma could’ve seen the show I did in Nashua, N.H., a week ago. I don’t know what she would’ve thought about the jokes but I talked about her respect for memorization, which she required of her pupils, and I recited Shakespeare and Frost and Housman, poems I’d learned back in my teen years that stick with me, also an erotic sonnet of my own and a string of lowbrow limericks. I stood there reciting for 800 people but really it was for Grandma Dora. I led the audience in singing “My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,” which Grandma surely knew by heart and the audience sang it with passion and I saw nobody, absolutely not a soul, google it on their cellphone.

I’m an old man and I’m still trying to impress my grandma though now she’s become a contemporary. She would be saddened by my two divorces and she would love my wife who is independent and practical and loving and forgiving and she’d be stunned by Jenny playing Rossini at the opera and “Giselle” at the ballet, but this crowd happily singing by heart a great national song about freedom and justice would exhilarate Grandma as it does me.

The anthem by Julia Ward Howe,

When sung by an audience — wow.

The Lord’s judgment seat,

The jubilant feet,

I wish we could hear it right now.

My nephew Matt worked on the development of the porcine heart valve, roaming from Minnesota to Norway to Germany to France to find new colleagues, and now this valve is keeping me going. It wasn’t developed so I could play more golf. No. So I’ll keep going and try to make Dora Powell proud. No easy task.

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I’m fond of progress. We used to drive around with a big road map spread out and yell, “I told you to turn west a half mile ago, ya dummy,” and now a robolady is our navigator directing us in gentle tones and road trips are more enjoyable. I make impulsive phone calls to distant friends as Alexa is guiding us through Connecticut and say, “Hi, Marcia, how’s it going?” and due to bandwidth or magnetic resonance or the Earth’s rotation, I know I won’t get a bill for $85 from AT&T. This is still a source of wonder to an old coot like me.

And instead of having a back seat full of encyclopedias and atlases and dictionaries, I just google “Hartford” and read about its history.

And most important: I am 23 years older than my uncles who died from the same congenital heart defect I had, a gift of time, and I am permanently grateful to my surgeons Dr. Orszulak and Dr. Dearani and the Mayo Clinic and the anonymous wonks who did the tedious labor in sterile laboratories similar to the research labs the World’s Richest Nazi is now slamming shut whenever the mood strikes him.

Medical researchers who marshal the data from extensive tests, share their findings with other wonks, scramble for funding to do the research that will lead to procedures and pharmaceuticals that will change lives, getting no credit for their work, and now they live in fear of a car dealer from South Africa. Weird. But I just go on having a good time.

I’m a happy man, rather sane,

Who’s avoiding gin and cocaine,

And agitation

Although on occasion

I like to take walks in the rain.

But I worry about the kids. My generation is fading away, and the kids who type 50 wpm with their thumbs on a cellphone are becoming prominent but will they have the chance to be as wildly lucky as I’ve been? The sun comes up and the sun sets due to the Earth’s rotation, the Mississippi runs into the gulf and you can call it whatever you want to, it’s the same gulf, and as Solomon said, “What is is what has been and what shall be, there is nothing new under the sun,” except that we find ourselves with a president who seems to have no idea what he’s doing, and every morning my wife puts the newspaper down and says, “You won’t believe this,” but I do. The man feels obliged to astonish us with wild irregularities but it keeps getting harder. He could turn the Rose Garden into a Tesla lot and the East Room into a casino and paint the White House mauve and we’d say, “Well, that’s him doing his thing.” The only thing that would amaze us is if he wore a green tie.

The man is unable to tell a joke or to apologize or express sympathy and he demands absolute obedience. His executive order forbidding “divisive narratives” eliminated slavery and the confiscation of Native land from our national history, they never happened, just as Disney does not show ducks or mice using bad words.

His order to allow full water pressure in showerheads I can go along with: our shower volume is controlled by a faucet so I can choose to conserve water if I wish. I do not yet support our acquisition of Greenland by force and having to face the insidious Danes and nor do I see a need to Americanize Canada and teach 41 million people the Pledge of Allegiance and “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

I’m willing to listen to reason. Like most Americans, I don’t like the idea of radical Marxist troublemakers in the federal judiciary but feel that through due process these things can be worked out.

Meanwhile my wife says, “Listen to this” and I listen. What is beyond the man’s capability? Declaring a national emergency and dismissing the Supreme Court? Deporting George Will? Evidently the American military will put on a triumphal parade on his birthday with parachutists landing on the Ellipse and the marching bands of all the services and tanks rumbling up Pennsylvania Avenue.

I would not want to be the person in charge of hiring the cheering crowds along the route and making sure they cheer and that no divisive banners are held up over people’s heads, but I pulled the plug on the guy long ago. I’ll be living my life.

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I grew up fundamentalist so we didn’t do Easter and our little girls didn’t get bright new pastel jackets and lace bonnets and white gloves because we celebrated Christ’s resurrection all year round, not only in April, but now I’m Episcopalian and so I find fresh flowers in church and a buoyant mood, the hymns are of a hallelujah nature, the pews are packed, and during the Exchange of Peace when we usually shake hands, there may be some hugging. Sanctified Brethren were not huggers. We thought it might lead to dancing.

You can take the boy out of the Brethren but you can’t take the Brethren out of the boy and sometimes my wife looks at me and says, “Please smile” and I do but only for a moment. I go through life with the demeanor of a pallbearer and I’m almost 83. There are very few photographs of me smiling and the smiles strike me as forced. Inside, I’m generally rather happy or at least content, I love this woman, am grateful for my life, which has been elongated by open-heart surgery (thank you, Dr. Orszulak and Dr. Dearani) and anti-seizure meds and blood thinner, enjoy my work, am glad that I long ago quit smoking and drinking and gave up golf. But I look like a man whose dog died, though I haven’t had a dog for fifty years. Dogs are wary of me, probably feeling I will chastise them for their iniquities.

Is there cosmetic surgery that can repair a fundamentalist face? Some liposuction to loosen the lips and collagen injections to make a reliable grin with a guarantee it wouldn’t eventually turn into a smirk or leer?

Seriously, I believe in Easter, whatever terms you use — resurrection, transformation, metamorphosis, conversion, renewal — the opportunity for a person to shed pretense and delusion and resentment and be free — it’s never too late, that the 80s can be the best time of your life — that Donald John Trump could become a nice person, learn how to apologize, to express sympathy, pet a dog, tell a joke, pick up a small child and talk to it, take up folk dancing, lead men’s Bible study, not refer to his critics as scumbags. I honestly do. I believe the South African car dealer could become a philanthropist, give his little boy a name, adopt stray animals, join the Bible study group.

I went through a transformation in my mid-twenties, nothing so dramatic as those, but I dumped my undergraduate English lit courses that taught that great literature is weepy, jittery, gloomy, paranoid. Professor Foster lectured one day on Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which he said was a meditation on death, but I’d heard Frost recite it once and clearly it was a poem about stopping by woods on a snowy evening. The profs didn’t teach Mark Twain or Dickens. And they ignored Chaucer, The Miller’s Tale, the young Absolon singing to Alisoun one night at her bedroom window and she lets him kiss her but she sticks her butt out the window and he kisses that and is furious and goes and gets a hot poker and comes back and asks for another kiss and Alisoun’s lover for a joke sticks his butt out the window and lets a fart and Absolon sticks the hot poker in him. This is the beginning of English lit. It changed my life. I started writing limericks.

Kafka was lonely in Prague

And lived in a neurotic fog,

Groaning and keening

And longing for meaning —

He should’ve just gotten a dog.

And so, instead of a career teaching college sophomores to despise poetry, I’m on the road doing a solo show for elderly people my age wanting an evening free from thoughts about the car dealer and the scumbagger. It’s a good life. And it wasn’t the result of an aptitude test or counseling or sitting in a circle of folding chairs with other people trying to find themselves, it was purely an accident. I have no ambition to be taken seriously, I’m just another version of the home health-care nurse, I go when called to people who need me. On Good Maundy Thursday I was in Amherst.

Emily D. of Amherst

Never was vulgar or cursed

Except when birds

Dropped little turds,

She said, “Poop” but that was the worst.

Bless your heart.

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The family took the subway downtown to a dance performance as a favor to the one dance fan in our midst and she thanked us for it afterward. “Thank you for indulging me, I really loved this,” she said. People ought to do that more often. Me, for one. My wife and daughter leave the apartment for hours, leaving me to work in silence. It seems awkward to say, “Thank you for going away,” so I don’t.

I didn’t care for the modernist pieces on the program, the rattly shrieky unmelodic music, the grievous angular movements suggesting despair and panic. The Dow Jones had been crashing all day and I was imagining the three of us losing the apartment and having to sleep in the bus depot so I was more in the mood for tap dancing and tangos, dancing less attitudinal, more aspirational. But the subway ride was worth it.

We went downtown on the Broadway Local and the conductor was a guy who liked his job, you could tell by the rhythms of his voice as he called out the stops, and the cheerful “Watch for the closing doors, please” and now and then a “Thanks for riding” and tossing in notable sites, “Columbus Circle” and “Lincoln Center” and “Port Authority Bus Terminal,” the one where we’d be sleeping someday when the portfolio crashes.

Crime is down in the city, which my relatives in the Heartland don’t want to believe, but we have a terrific new police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, a Harvard grad who spent a few years as sanitation commissioner, if you can imagine that. Harvard grads are supposed to work in the Brookings Institution; she made the city cleaner by picking up trash at midnight instead of 6 a.m., frustrating the rat population. She’s spent 16 years in the NYPD — “I know it like the back of my hand” — and she uses the word “recidivism” easily, the revolving door, a handful of persons responsible for hundreds of crimes.

You hear it in her voice, the sense of nobility in plain old public service. So we notice more cops in subway stations and on trains, not parked in squad cars on their cellphones. Squad cars aren’t so useful in Manhattan as in, say, Manhattan, Kansas: the number of speeding tickets is rather slight, given the congestion, but it is reassuring to us citizens to come across cops on the street and in the subway, visible, good guys, maybe a little overdressed with cop gear, but still. The woman is an honor to the Tisch family.

The police presence makes us less wary, more aware of the sights, the little shops, the odd attractions, food wagons, historic plaques, passers-by expressing their individuality, the occasional historic hippie with a headful of Seventies hair, and then you come to the marquee for the dance and duck in, find your seats, and wait for the lights to dim.

They did Aaron Copland’s friendly old “Rodeo” choreographed by Agnes de Mille, with the fiddle tunes and the cowboys and ladies and the cowgirl outcast, and that was a hit, and then the woman next to me asked, “Are you a Martha Graham fan?” I said, stupidly, “I grew up more of a Billy Graham fan,” and asked her what brought her and she said quietly, “My daughter is in the next dance.”

And right there, that made the evening for me. The pride in her voice. “How did she get into dance?” I asked.

“She did it on her own, when she was a teenager. She loved it.”

“No orthopedic problems along the way?” She laughed. “You wouldn’t believe it,” she said.

And then the daughter came out in a flowing white silk gown that when she did high kicks made dramatic geometric impressions and she interacted with a railing and did some jittery and jumpy things, but when it ended, I stood up and clapped and yelled, along with everyone else. A person believes that the discipline and passion that go into creating those memorable twelve minutes, or creating memorable music or poetry or theater, will see us through the gyrations of the Dow. These days I’m a fan of journalism and I’ve read commentary on the current guy that made me laugh so hard I couldn’t talk. We have a deranged president. Republicans elected him and they need to find a home for him. Assisted living. Florida. A big patio looking at the Gulf of America.

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I lay on a table 95% naked last month while my dermatologist Allison examined me for growths and blemishes that might need to be snipped off and biopsied and as she did so, she told me that she had been a fan of my radio show in her childhood and she was curious about a song I once sang, “I ride an old paint, I lead an old dan, I’m going to Montana to throw the hoolihan,” and was curious about the meaning of “old paint,” “old dan,” and “hoolihan,” and had I written the song myself.

This is the sort of thing that makes a man grateful to have gone into broadcasting years ago. I took a radio job in order to come in out of the cold — it was Minnesota, I was a parking lot attendant at a huge lot on the Mississippi bluff — but here I was, almost naked, explaining a traditional cowboy song to a doctor, a free exchange of information. Life is good.

None of my classmates were Allisons. I come from the era of Barbaras and Carols and Sharons, plain names given by Depression-era parents in hopes of some future employment, but a new generation came in with aspirational names like Arabella, Olivia, Olympia, that opened doors previously closed. It wasn’t DEI; it was the ambition of the parents giving baby girls names suitable for actresses and opera stars. The fabulousness of Renée Fleming’s voice will help hundreds of young Renées become cancer researchers and rocket scientists instead of drive-up window clerks at McDonald’s.

My parents intended for me to become a carpenter like my dad and they named me Gary but I, in the eighth grade, decided to be a writer and gave myself the name Garrison, which is more authoritative, and it worked out okay. In fear of winding up in construction, pouring concrete, nailing up studs, I developed incompetence and now I need to ask my wife to tighten a hinge or loosen a flange, I am a complete stranger to the toolbox, and as a result, she takes the manly role in our household, she manages the finances, she drives the car (I have double vision), she makes basic repairs, she takes positions on foreign affairs and domestic issues and I am only required to be charming. As a Gary, I’d be replacing spark plugs and installing a new showerhead. Instead, I do this, what I’m doing now. I’m in the business of nattering.

Allison was a pro. She showed off her expertise by rattling off the scientific names for my various abnormalities and she snipped some flesh and sent it to the lab (nothing cancerous, it turns out) and as she examined me, I wrote a limerick for her in my head. (My form of carpentry.)

Dermatologists must have good skin

And are probably comely and thin

With no pimples or cysts

Or scars on their wrists,

And named Allison, not Marilyn.

It cheered me up, being asked about “I Ride an Old Paint” and I got dressed and she came in and gave me a big hug. I was brought up by people who hardly ever hugged except maybe children ten or under and maybe mothers on their deathbeds. Hugging was considered sensuous. And sensuality can lead to sexuality. Men my age don’t hug each other; some X and Z men do but we avoid them. If you, dear reader, throw your arms around your laptop as you read this, okay, but don’t do it to me should we meet someday. Allison’s embrace, however, was heartfelt, as you’d expect for a man who’d sung to her as a child. I doubt she’d give that sort of hug to a carpenter who’d just nailed together some shelving.

So I walked out East 72nd Street feeling lighthearted, even though it was March and a cold wind was blowing and I had read in the waiting room an article titled “Interrupted Sleep Patterns May Lead to Early Dementia,” which is not what a man my age wants to think about, and the nation is in the hands of a deranged executive out to punish enemies and wreak carnage in Washington, but spring is coming, I am mobile, my skin looks good, and when I die, they’ll take my saddle from the wall, put it on my pony, lead him out of his stall, tie my bones to his back turn our faces to the west, and we’ll ride the prairie that I love the best. A man can ask for no more.

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I dropped my glasses in a café in New York and couldn’t find them and a young man got down on his knees and got them out from under a table. I thanked him, but it wasn’t enough. I said, “I really appreciate good manners more than I ever used to.” He said, “I know what you mean.”

There’s a lot of ugliness going around. I’ve never been called “scum” or “sleazebag” that I’m aware of though motorists do sometimes curse us slow pedestrians in rough tones but now that national leadership has embraced these particular terms I suppose the day is coming when TSA personnel will feel free (“Is that your briefcase, white trash?” “Hold your hands over your head, buttface, and stand very still.”) and give us a full-body patdown if we object. Security as an excuse for ugly manners, we’ve seen it before.

Some readers have called my writing “garbage,” but that’s literary criticism and I don’t take it personally. Same with “I used to like your writing back when you were funny”: each person is the judge of funny/unfunny. But “sleazebag” and “scum” deny a person’s humanity, and now that they’re accepted in high places, we are in for a rough ride.

I went through TSA Security in the Richmond, Virginia, airport, Concourse A, and an agent said to me, “Is there a laptop in your briefcase, my friend?” and it was the first time in fifteen years that a TSA person had addressed me that way. And when I pulled the laptop out, he said, “Thank you, brother.” I was stunned. I said, “Your mother brought you up right, my friend.” He said, “Thank you.” At LaGuardia, TSA agents are chosen for their aptitude at yelling orders like prison guards. The theory, I guess, is that rudeness will make a terrorist flinch. I doubt that this is true.

Once at LaGuardia at a self-serve kiosk on Concourse C, I took a chicken salad sandwich and a Heath bar to checkout and couldn’t figure out where to hold the barcode for the code reader and the young woman waiting behind me in line did not say, “Get out of the way, douchebag, and let a normal person in,” no, she showed me how to check out, and I thanked her. I said, “Thanks very much for your help, I appreciate it.” And I meant it.

Sometimes I’ve stood at a counter trying to figure out where to place the credit card chip to make the thing beep and buy me a bag of peanuts, and a line of resentful customers forms behind me but they do not yell, “Step aside, scuzzball” or “Get lost, human sewage,” somebody steps up to take my hand and tap the card and make the transaction. I look him in the eye and say, “That’s very kind of you, sir. Have a nice day.”

Electronics have changed the world we live in. The smartphone comes with dozens of apps, each of them a puzzle, the instructions inscrutable, and it took me ten minutes once to figure out how to click on the flashlight. The laptop computer is so complex you need an M.S. in computer science to figure out all the functions, and when suddenly something goes wrong — your page shrinks to postcard size and the font is 6 pt. Caslon and you cannot, cannot, cannot make it go to 8 ½ x 11 and 24 pt. Perpetua, and you see an 11-year-old nearby and ask for his help and he clicks on Layout and RetroText and Alignment and Dimensional Manifest and Die Grundlagen der Relativität and your screen is back to where you want it, and you thank him and buy him a Fudgsicle — this happens to me often. The laptop holds all the secrets of the universe and I only want to use it as a typewriter and suddenly I’m dependent on a fifth-grader.

Does he look at me and think, “Scumbag. Idiot. Snot rag.”? I hope not. I am old and out of touch, slow afoot, living in the past, but that night in Richmond, doing my stand-up act, by way of demonstrating that we are one country still, I led 400 Virginians in singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “My Girl” and “How Great Thou Art” and “You Are My Sunshine.” They hadn’t done this for a while. They were moved, even the men. I saw a couple men dab at their eyes. This is no small thing.

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We seem to be in a war against science and research, which is causing anxiety among us geezers grateful for anti-seizure meds that guard against us suddenly shaking uncontrollably on the street corner and strangers having to remember first aid from 4-H to keep us from strangling on a hot dog and when we’re not reading about that, we see news of low-frequency seismic waves that can travel for hundreds of miles underground and cause tall brick buildings to crash to the ground, which is disturbing to us in Manhattan, and then there’s news of Mr. and Mrs. JD Vance who announced their trip to Greenland to see the dogsled races only to be told, “Nobody invited you,” so they flew to the U.S. military base at Pituffik for three hours and Mr. Vance announced that Greenland needed American defense whether it wanted it or not. He did not change the name of the area to Pitiful.

An interesting time we live in. And Wisconsin elected a Supreme Court judge other than the one Elon Musk favored and offered large sums of money to voters in a bid for a win.

But the crucial news is that spring is coming, the baseball season has begun and I will wend my way to CF and get a broad view of the action, and I will do the last big outdoor Prairie Home Companion of my life at Tanglewood on June 21, and then, unless RFKJ allows dementia research to proceed, I will retire to Shady Acres and play Parcheesi.

I’m enjoying being 82 more than I thought I would when I was your age, kiddo. I thought I’d be cranky and irritable but I’m not. I imagined that if the U.S. government canceled research contracts for institutions that used certain terms such as “Gulf of Mexico” instead of Gulf of America, the correct term, that I’d be upset about it. I’m not. I simply find it of interest and I move on. If the Justice Department told me, “You cannot cast scorn upon an elected government official,” I would say, “The idiot doesn’t even know how to punctuate his first two initials.”

I believe I know right from wrong and I think about it on a daily basis and also intensely on Sunday morning shortly before 11 depending how long the sermon went. The sermon itself is sinful in that it falls short of perfection and sometimes the attempt of woman or man to approach God in words is so inadequate that it’s best to tune out and I do and sometimes write a limerick in the bulletin.

Was Donald J. Trump a recruit in
The Russians’ quest for a route in-
To the Oval Office
By way of a novice?
Trump pooh-poohs it: pooh-Putin.

But I sit up straight during Confession and I am disappointed by the brevity of the Anglican liturgy, spoken briskly in unison, which would be sufficient for a small child but a man my age needs more time. I envy the Catholics who can come in on Saturday and find a priest in a booth, his ear to a little window, waiting for me to recite the entire epic account. I was a boss for many years and committed sins of carelessness and arrogance and stifled promising talents and I was a pitiful parent and miserable mate and my memory is full of downright dumb things, not so much hell-raising as having been an outstanding disappointment, sloughing off on the writing and offering inferior goods to a radio audience, and I count on Confession to put the mounds and hillocks of trash behind me and start anew and by God it works, it really does. I walk home along Amsterdam Avenue and I look forward to the week. My fundamentalist upbringing trains the memory as to be accusatory but the grandeur of the acolytes walking tall and proud, the majestic woman swinging the censer, the vestments and candles, the stateliness of the King James readings, all work to stifle my peasant superstitions.

I leave the sanctuary calmed and renewed, honest to God at least for a while, and often I skip coffee hour because I don’t want to hear about the stuff in the first paragraph. All the way home along Amsterdam I feel it doesn’t matter. I don’t know about your church but in ours we don’t pray for stupidity, cruelty, and supercilious pride and smug disdain. I see dads pushing tiny kids in strollers and a mom following with a toddler and I pray for each of them as they pass me.

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I went to the Met recently to see Beethoven’s “Fidelio” and hang out with 3,800 very well-dressed patrons to see a passionate story about political tyranny but mainly to see the soprano Lise Davidsen who is worth the price of admission and more, especially when surrounded by the Met chorus, mostly men, imprisoned for political crimes but nonetheless in gorgeous voice. As for Lise, architects have designed enormous opera houses and finally they’ve designed a singer whose voice fills it so you feel it even in the cheaper seats.

I like “Fidelio” because it’s Beethoven so it’s got soul and also the story is simple, there aren’t a lot of counts and countesses to keep track of or Wagnerian goddesses, and I think German sings better than Italian, it sounds more like my kind of folks. It has warmth. And there’s no need to bother with the English subtitles: Leonore dresses up as a man so she can rescue her guy Florestan from being hanged. That’s all you need to know. There’s some growling and hollering by some basses and baritones and there’s a kerfuffle with another soprano but when the 6’2” Leonore comes onstage you know you’re at an opera and you know what’s up. The tenor is going to be strangled if the soprano doesn’t save him. And when she strides across the stage and lets fly with that powerful loving tone that stuns even the brass section, you know she’s up to the job. This is no Mimi or Madame Butterfly, this is a Norwegian lyric dramatic soprano who’s pregnant with twins and canceling her schedule to deliver them –– “Fidelio” is her finale until 2026, and here she is singing so gorgeously while carrying two embryonic people — sometimes you see her put a hand on her abdomen as if to say, “Stille, stille.” This is a woman to reckon with. I married a woman like her. So have other men. After Lise delivers the twins, I wish she’d take over the Democratic Party.

And at the end of the opera, prisoners released, reunited with their wives and sweethearts, there’s a big joyous crowd scene “Wer ein holdes Weib errungen” (Whoever has won a noble wife) with happy children waving and women dancing and flags waving — he did compose “The Ode To Joy” after all; the man knows how to throw a party — and the curtain comes down and it gets a standing ovation, as it should.

The Met is also doing “Moby-Dick,” which I won’t see though I admire their bravery — there’s only one woman in it (in a boy’s role), otherwise a shipload of doomed sailors — but I’d advise them to aim for the Strong Woman/Joyful Ending model — stories of warrior queens, Catherine the Great, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Eleanor Roosevelt, and a big choral festival at the end perhaps with a parade of animals. Why should that be limited to Aida? Find a place for an elephant, a pair of camels, and a team of horses. It’s called SHOW business, people, it’s not a sharing of painful memories.

Too many people think of opera as something that requires costume jewelry and a hairstyle and a glass of Cointreau and the use of critical terms (insight, luminosity, otherworldly), but the Fidelio intermission was very amiable and easygoing. I stood in line at the Men’s for a while and got into several conversations, one with a New York guy and another with a male couple from the Blue Ridge, all of us stunned by the gorgeous singing. And after the standing O, the crowd streamed across Lincoln Center plaza, a spring night, the fountains spritzing, the buzz and honk of Columbus Avenue, people descending into the subway, cabs lined up, a delicious New York night made all the more thrilling by having seen a genuine Star on stage.

I’s amazing that this was accomplished by a Norwegian soprano. I know Norwegians and they are self-effacing by nature, taciturn, stoical, and this one is absolutely joyous. The story is that she hoped to become a folksinger but someone heard her and said, “No, honey, this isn’t for ‘Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.’ This is the shore.” The Kennedy Center under its new management may go to auto shows, beauty contests, and pro wrestling, but high art lives in New York. As we say in Tromsø, “Hvert liv krever stor skjønnhet.” Every life requires great beauty.

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It is highly informative to watch another marriage in a moment of stress and see how calmly they handle it compared to the hysterics that I’d go through in similar circumstances: 6:20 a.m., a nephew and his wife are assembling their bags to catch a cab to the airport for a 9 a.m. flight and the guy suddenly can’t find his wallet and so the search begins, bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, as I stand watching in my pajamas — the two are guests in our apartment — and it amazes me how calm and cheerful they are. “Are you sure you saw it this morning?” she asks, matter-of-factly. “Yes, I’m sure,” he says and because he is a tech wizard, not a fiction writer, she takes him at his word.

I’ve been in his situation numerous times when I proceeded rapidly from mounting despair to self-loathing and having to be institutionalized in a locked ward and tranquilized, but this young couple doesn’t go there. The search proceeds. The wife makes a few helpful suggestions in a calm voice, no shrieking, no wild hand gestures. Minutes pass. No panic. The husband unzips a pocket on his knapsack and there is the wallet. All is well. No divorce lawyer got involved, no therapist, priest, or psychic.

These two are rationalists but I am a writer and Democrat and I need assistance when leaving on a trip to make sure I have my wallet, phone and phone charger, ID, Visa card, meds, hearing aids, notebook and pens, eyedrops, boarding pass, and make sure I am wearing a belt. I’ve lost some weight and sometimes, approaching the TSA desk, briefcase in one hand and ID in the other, I feel trouser slippage and how would Security deal with a depantsed person — would there be due process or might you be put directly on a flight to El Salvador? You tell me.

The Leader of Our Great Nation shows a powerful sense of self-confidence that was denied to us who grew up in Christian homes in the Midwest. We were given a keen sense of our own insignificance. I saw — under ferocious preaching on Sunday that did not encourage a large ego — that we were not worthy of admiration, and only by God’s grace did we presume to come to His Table. In school, we learned about LaSalle, Marquette, Father Hennepin, Joseph Nicollet, who had claimed the Midwest for France, but Louis XV was more interested in sugar from the Caribbean than fur from the North and so he withdrew and Voltaire said, “All we lost was a few acres of snow.” This remark still stings, centuries later. We could’ve been French and instead we raised corn to feed the hogs.

I left home for New York to make my wife happy, the best reason there is, and here I learned to enjoy my insignificance. Nobody notices me on the subway so I get to look at them. I’ve stumbled and fallen three times and each time four people rushed to my side within three seconds to help me up, not because I’m an author but because I’m human. I fell on Amsterdam Avenue and whacked my head and lay stunned on the sidewalk for a moment and six people rushed to my side, helped me up and a man hailed a cab for me and they kept asking if I was okay — I was more than okay, I was gratified. In Minnesota I was a motorist, here I’m a pedestrian. I’m aware of a civil society around me: I look out for you, you look out for me.

And sometimes an old friend calls from back home and pours out her or his heart in a way they never would’ve in the social gatherings where we used to meet. Around the dinner table we talked politics but in the hush of the late-night cellphone call, we speak from the heart. A friend of half a century calls and talks of her husband, a scholar and musician, his tenderness toward my family, and how she looks upon his suicide as a noble deed, to cut short the pain of his decline. I listen and don’t comment. I used to be a celeb, now I’m a confidant, a great honor. It doesn’t say so on my ID but those who need to know seem to know. I don’t do therapy, don’t offer rationalism, just try to be the best listener I can be. Thanks for listening.

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I’ve had an easy life, like canoeing down a river, one mile leads to the next, Tuesday follows Monday, obey the rules, portage around dams, don’t approach alligators unless their eyes are closed, and don’t argue with men with large eyebrows carrying shotguns.

I am a writer, it’s as simple as that. I wake up in the morning with an urge to use English rather than learn a new one and to do as Mrs. Moehlenbrock said: check for mistakes and read it aloud to hear if it makes sense. I was only ten at the time and she made me feel important as if I had something to say. I retain this confidence, despite having written plenty of dumb stuff. J.D. Salinger knew how to stop; I don’t. Being a writer by habit means that I spend time thinking to myself, which disturbs many women, who think I’m embittered, depressed, bored, or wishing someone would amuse me with anecdotes from the country club, but I’m not: I’m thinking. I’ve loved several women who didn’t understand that thinking would stop if I started talking. This happened on many occasions. Brilliant ideas one moment, small talk the next. But now I’ve found a woman who is up to the job: she is a Reader. She likes to be quiet for long periods of time without my engaging her in book club-type conversation about Themes and Interpretations nor the phone ringing and our offspring asking if we will stay at the hotel in Bethesda, Maryland, for two nights or three and will she have her own room. I can accommodate having a reader in the same room I’m thinking in, and my only qualm is simply this: why do I never see her reading one of her husband’s books and chuckling melodiously?

If you slept nightly with a thinly clad man over a period of thirty years, would you not want to know what’s on his mind, especially those intimate secrets that can only be revealed in humorous fiction? Wouldn’t you?

And the answer is: No, probably not. Romance requires a certain mystery, dim light, faint music, suggestive fragrances. Intimacy is about intimations, it’s not about flash photography. Very few people marry their proctologist, it’s a fact. Look it up. (Or rather, don’t.)

I hope this makes you feel special, dear reader. There is something going on between us that is not shared by the slim elegant woman reclining fifteen feet from my right elbow. I asked her, “How’s that book you’re reading?” She said, “Interesting.” In other words, “Don’t talk to me.”

As it says in Mark’s Gospel, she and I “are no longer two, but one flesh.” But what different fleshes the two are: she is a bird, I am a bull. Does this give me the power of flight? I don’t believe so.

As a friend of hers told her thirty years ago, “If you marry an older man, someday you’ll be married to an old man.” And here she is. But the old man is a happy old man, thanks be to heaven. He sits at his loom and enjoys making sentences into paragraphs and then remaking them, an occupation that has preoccupied him since puberty. I’m not bragging, just remarking on the unusualness of it and feeling grateful. I had my chances to take up drugs that make you stupid. I quit drinking because I could feel the clarity that resulted.

In my youth, I saw Albert Woolson, the last living veteran of the Union Army, riding in a parade in Minneapolis, an ancient man waving a flag in his tiny translucent hand. It was good of him, who’d been a drummer boy in the Army and had seen Lincoln in the flesh, to agree to ride around and symbolize history, but I decline to be the last of my kind. I loved my predecessors, Benchley and Perelman and Thurber and Woody Allen, but I cheer for the up-and-comers. We need to keep comedy flying, all the more so as we observe a successful fascist movement led by an aging playboy from Queens who has turned the Republican Party, whose cause Albert Woolson was loyal to back when it had ideals, into a cult. Donald McDonald has never told a joke so it was funny. Pompous nincompoops seldom do. But enough about that. Do me a favor and make someone you love laugh out loud. Start with the little ones and move up to the tall ones. They’re the hardest.

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