Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 6

I once walked down Wabasha Avenue in downtown St. Paul and was stopped by an old wino who asked for something to eat and when I gave him a couple bucks, he said, “You’re Garrison Keillor, you can do better than that.” The man had bad habits but his thinking was clear. I was a nobody from Anoka who got his picture on the cover of Time and my notoriety should mean profits for the needy. But that was many years ago and fame fades fast. I haven’t been recognized by a wino for at least thirty years.

There’s a new and larger crop of instant celebs every year and if I got drunk and needed dough, I wouldn’t know Naomi Nobody from Louise Illustrious, due to my not watching TV except for baseball all those years. I was too busy being well known but it’s okay, ordinary daily life can be fascinating too.

Last week Jenny and I had the vast pleasure of a visit by a young couple from California who are expecting a baby girl in June, both of them tech wizards who are adept at explaining things to a man from the Typewriter Age, the woman from a Japanese family, so there was rich information about Japan, the language and culture, plus the woo-woo aspects of California, and then there was the absolute wonder of gazing at 3-D ultrasound pictures of the embryo’s face, noble, a beacon of hope, and feeling the joy of the young mother and papa. They are quietly beside themselves. The embryo is about the size of a cob of corn, but if corn could bring joy like this, Iowa would be paradise.

I grew up under Eisenhower, the man who commanded the army that defeated Hitler, and now I feel we’re headed toward a Hulk Hogan presidency. I pray otherwise, but the sun set on the British Empire and perhaps it is our turn now. But having this couple visiting us has been a great gift of wonder and contemplation and I pray the baby grows up in a country that cherishes honor and benevolence and beauty.

A person needs beauty in this crazy world in which you order a prescription refill online and it won’t go through and you wind up talking to a woman in Ulan Bator who thinks you’re complaining about “reception.” This is a well-known national pharmaceutical chain, it’s not Donny’s Drugs operating out of the trunk of his car, and it’s out to build its profits at the expense of service and I need latanoprost eyedrops to keep glaucoma at bay so I don’t need a dog to guide me to the corner bus stop. Our family had schizophrenic spaniels when I was a child and I never developed a close loving relationship with a dog as other children did, which explains my pervasive detachment from social relationships and lack of facial expression, which is why I went into radio rather than becoming a TV newscaster.

I looked solemn on the cover of Time and that’s the only expression I have; I don’t do delight, just solemnity. In my wedding pictures, I look like a pallbearer.

But looking at this 3-D ultrasound of a radiant child, eyes closed, waiting for June, makes me want to support the orchestras so she can sit in a hall and hear Beethoven and Mozart and Messiaen done by classy players and make sure Yosemite and Zion are still around. I paddled down the Mississippi from Bemidji to the St. Anthony Falls when I was in college and hope she can too and take the architecture tour around the island of Manhattan. She needs to hike the mountains and stop by the Little Bighorn to ponder that classic fool, George Custer. Gettysburg and Mardi Gras are worth her while and the Minnesota State Fair.

A panhandler named the Internal Revenue Service needs to approach Elon Musk (the W.R.M.) and Jeff Bezos and the other guy and ask for an appropriate donation. It’s a great country, friend, and it’s up to us to defend it. If Donald McDonald is your idea of greatness, then there’s no drug available to help. Sobriety can help but then you lose your spot in the clubhouse. But we’ve got to keep this country great for the sake of this beautiful apparition achieving perfection in her mama’s midsection. Greatness is good for people once you know what it is.

The post The beauteous face in utero appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Church was fairly full Sunday, the second in Lent, and I stood in back before the organ prelude, enjoying a cup of coffee and a couple introduced themselves, Tom and Jean, visiting from Washington, D.C. Interesting people. He is newly retired from the Defense Department, responsible for maintenance of nuclear stockpiles, and they were visiting New York simply because they like the city. I didn’t introduce myself: I like the city because I’m anonymous here.

So we sat together in the third pew and I read the bulletin and the Gospel reading caught my eye, from Luke, the verse in which the Lord gathers His own like a hen gathers her brood under her wings, so I scribbled a limerick:

The Bible says God’s like a hen

Who collects His brood now and then.

We are chicks in his sight

And not all that bright,

Including us illustrious men.

There was a long prayer, led by a cantor, praying for the Church, our Bishops, for all who believe in God, for the peace of the world — it covered a lot of territory, some of it tricky — how do you pray for “those in positions of public trust” when many of them you wish would disappear? We prayed for the poor and all who suffer, for refugees and prisoners, and I thought of the migrants deported in chains to El Salvador despite a federal court order. Lord, have mercy, the congregation intoned. We prayed for our enemies and I thought of mine — I have four, and I prayed that they not know how much harm they caused — and we prayed for a blessing on all human labor, and I remembered the doormen in our building and Lulu our cleaning lady, and we prayed for those who have died, and I immediately thought of Alan K. Simpson, the Republican senator from Cody, Wyoming, who died last week.

Senator Simpson listened to a radio show I used to do and he wrote me a fan letter on official stationery and once, when I was in Washington, I had coffee with him and he told me a story about a contest that cowboys used to conduct when he was a boy. They’d take turns dropping their trousers and competing to see who could pick up a silver dollar using only his bare buttocks, and if necessary, have a playoff for a half-dollar or a quarter. There was a genuineness about the man that was pure gold. I knew he was a conservative and it didn’t matter; what was important was the integrity.

I stole the story and used it often in monologues, changing the cowboys to Norwegians, members of the Sons of Knute. It’s an anecdote that never fails.

I confessed my sins, which, the past week, had been mostly things left undone rather than done, failure to love my neighbors, and so forth, and after Communion, I shook hands with my neighbors, including Tom and Jean, and after we were dismissed to go out in the world to do the work we were put here to do, I invited them to come have coffee with me and my friend Richard.

We hiked down Amsterdam Avenue to a lunch place and ordered breakfast and had a very amiable time. Tom and Jean, it turned out, are Catholics so they’d come to my Episcopal church as tourists, and we started telling Catholic jokes. Tom told the best one.

Three nuns die and come to the gates of Heaven and St. Peter meets them and says, “I know you’re nuns and you’ve led holy lives but still I have to ask you each a question. He asks the first: “Who was the first man?” She says, “That’s an easy one. Adam.” He asks the second, “Who was the first woman?” She says, “That’s an easy one. Eve.” He asks the third nun, “What was the first thing Eve said to Adam.” The nun said, “That’s a hard one.” “Right,” said St. Peter, “come on in.”

It was a fine Sunday. I took a detour into Central Park and saw yellow daffodils and white crocuses, small clusters, and I looked around and saw I was surrounded by youth, young couples pushing baby strollers, runners, little kids galloping around the playground, young couples arm in arm, youth out for a ramble, and I prayed for them. The meek shall not inherit the earth, the meek have failed to do what needed to be done; I pray for the young to bring justice and mercy and good humor to the land.

The post What I saw Sunday in New York appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

I’ve gotten a rave report from Bayfield, Wisconsin, that relatives of a friend slaughtered a hog and put on a pork feast for neighbors and that fresh pork compared to store-bought is like gin compared to turpentine, but I dare not mention this in my own home because my love looks down on pork due to fairy tales she was read as a child. Those stories omitted the fact that pigs are omnivores and will devour a rat or lizard as readily as plants and flowers, and does the size of the prey place the Three Pigs on a higher moral plane than I with my bratwurst? Does a lizard not have feelings? Is a baby bunny not capable of loyalty?

I will say this for our Current Occupant, he has never come out against pork — he feasts on it and so does his man Musk — a herd is but a appetizer, billions of dollars’ worth of hog go down that gullet, he devours the tusks too, and the Man is the first Occupant in my lifetime who’s taken a swing at the Canadians, who due to their northernness consider themselves uppermost but who are trying to transport their chaos south — five political parties, two languages, an unsingable national anthem, round bacon — by way of a porous border.

The Occupant is plowing new ground. His denunciation of President Zelenskyy, accusing him of starting Russia’s war against Ukraine, is new diplomatic territory for this country. Secretary Rubio, who was brought up to be anti-communist, is having to learn how to swim backward.

And now Reuters reports that the U.S. plans to deport 200,000 Ukrainians who fled to the U.S. legally, had an American sponsor, were financially responsible, simply as an act of cruelty to impress the war criminal who is our new ally.

The world wonders: “What will satisfy the man?” A presidential order requiring Bill Clinton to shine his shoes? Restoring capital punishment and hanging Joe Biden from the yardarm of a frigate in a rainstorm? The man is ambitious. Will we own the Gulf of America or can other countries use it?

To use part of the State of the Union speech to honor a boy cured of cancer even while pediatric cancer research funding is so low is not for the faint of heart. You and I would be hard put to do it. Members of Congress are not fools, they have assistants who read to them, and half of the Members stood and applauded when he denounced pediatric cancer without calling for funding to be restored. Great operas have been written featuring treachery on this scale. The Creating Hope Reauthorization Act, extending incentives for pediatric drug development: dumped. The Give Kids a Chance Act, to allow children with relapsed cancers to undergo treatments combining cancer drugs with other therapies: which one of you could walk into a sick child’s hospital room and tell the family, “Sorry. Pack up and go home. Canceled.”

The problem is that we need a King, and the Occupant is the person for the job. Create a constitutional monarch, but elective, not hereditary, because as we’ve seen in the U.K. the bloodlines can run thin and the heirs can be pale and sniveling. Give the king the power to ride in parades and wave and appear at dedications and grieve for the dead and pin medals on people. It’s the perfect job for a jackass.

The American people were looking for excitement.

Nixon was intriguing and Clinton flipped some skirts but Carter and Reagan were rather straight, and Bush 1 and Bush 2 were patrician and Obama was under severe restrictions as the First A-A and so he and the family had to be model prisoners for the whole eight years, keep their eyes straight and shoelaces tied, so the electorate decided to take a break and elect a playboy from Queens who needed rifle volleys and salutes, a chopper at the ready, and a golf course vacated for him and his four friends.

But the chaos. The gazillionaire in the china shop. The appointments of numbskulls. The clowning in Congress. How much is enough? Elect a king (or queen) every four years, give them the Smithsonian for a castle, let them be a spectacle for the amusement of the street people, and let some modest rationalist run the government. As Custer once said, “What could possibly go wrong?”

The post Another executive order from me appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

I became a cheerful person when I was in my twenties and got a job in radio. I’d been a mediocre student and was trying to be a poet but was averse to poverty so I needed a job and I landed the early morning shift because nobody else wanted to get up at 4 a.m. I come from somber fundamentalist stock, but I knew my job was to be lighthearted on cold dark Minnesota mornings, which is sort of like being a chaplain on Death Row, and I learned to impersonate lightheartedness and got good at it. And now I’ve been doing it for sixty years and actually love it.

I did a show at the Fox Theatre in Hutchinson, Kansas, last week that was one of the happiest of my long career, had a couple wonderful hours with a thousand Kansans, many of whom may have voted for this disaster of a president and his tycoon in the black cap and shades who’s running the government. But we didn’t talk about that. We sang “My country ’tis of thee” and The Battle Hymn of the Republic, including the verse about the circling camps and the dews and damps and dim and flaring lamps. We omitted political commentary entirely.

I am good at deletion. I deleted tobacco 40 years ago and alcohol 25, stopped them by simply not doing them anymore: you go through a rocky few days of distracting yourself with popcorn or writing limericks or drinking gallons of herbal tea and pretending it’s whiskey.

I finished a novel this week called So Long, Wobegon, which has been a wooden yoke around my neck for three years. I accomplished it by deletion. You write and you write and you write and you cut about 29/30ths of the whole mess and you’ve got something darned decent, maybe better. Non-writers don’t know this; they think writing is a talent, but it’s actually a drive, you’re driven to do it and once it’s on the page you can tell what is dead leaves and rubbish and you delete it. The laptop is a beautiful tool that lets you highlight the rubbish and click on CUT and it’s gone. A miracle.

Back in my youth I grew a big black beard that I wore to make myself look literary, same as I chain-smoked and soaked up whiskey in the belief that it was required of an author, and the day I went to a barber and got a shave was one of the happiest days of my life. Writing is in your head, it’s not a Look.

I did the show in Hutchinson with my singing partner Heather, the Tallest Best Vocalist in America, and our piano player Rich the Intuitive, and it was a piece of cake. She’s half my age, conservatory-trained and I’m a grumbly baritone but she turns me into a sweet alto — another miracle. We sang the Grateful Dead’s “Brokedown Palace” and Blake and Yeats and Burns and Emily Dickinson and Paul Simon —

This is the story of how we begin to remember.

This is the powerful pulsing of love in the vein.

This is the dream of falling and calling your name out.

These are the roots of rhythm and the roots of rhythm remain.

Meanwhile the tycoon in the black cap and shades is in charge, and the Republican Party, once anti-communist, is doing Putin’s bidding, and the White House is lost in irrational whimsy in imitation of William McKinley. It’s a wretched time in American history and it was a happy night in a small town in Kansas.

I came home and our dinner guests were despairing about the damage the guy in the black hat has done to USAID, the pregnant women and the children who will die of preventable diseases all because we’re no longer in the business of humanitarianism, we have ceased, by executive order, to be a benevolent nation. It’s all true but I took the opposite position, that cheerfulness is the American way, that despair is defeat. Do your best and forget the rest. Good cheer is contagious, can make you courageous. Pick up your feet and clap on the backbeat.

My generation was lucky. Our parents endured the Depression and the war, and we grew up with a plenitude of opportunity. We owe it to the kids to clean up this disaster. The Democrats need to set aside identity issues and unite as Americans to save the Republic.

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As we watch a white Christian patriarchy exert its influence in Washington, I think back to H.L. Mencken whom I admired back in eighth grade for his sharp tongue. I come from soft-spoken people who shunned mockery and I abandoned Mencken in my twenties when I became a romantic liberal but Project 2025 has made him relevant.

We’re living in Mencken’s world now. He said, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

There are worse things than being wrong: one is to be wrong and know it and try to ignore it, like the parade of Republicans insisting that they won the 2020 election. It’s like the man who walks into the doctor’s office with a wiener in his ear and a stalk of celery up his nose and says, “Doctor, what’s wrong with me?” and the doctor says, “You’re not eating properly.”

Pardoning people who attacked cops is not funny. Every one of us was instructed as children to respect the police and to stop when they say stop. You know it and I know it. It’s an outrage, and when Senator John Thune evades the subject by saying, “I’m not looking back,” he insults his own intelligence. He’s from the party of Lincoln and he presents an IQ of four score and seven.

It’s like the man and his wife who crashed into the bridge abutment and died and found themselves in heaven living in a beautiful house next to a golf course with an eternity of sunny days on which to play. The man said, If you hadn’t made me quit smoking, I could’ve been here ten years ago.”

President Crypto issued an executive order that revoked birthright citizenship, which is in Section 1 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. It’s like the Texas hockey team that drowned during spring training. It’s like what do you call the worst president in the history of the United States? You call him “Mister President.”

How did we come to this point, the glowering snowy-haired man with the South African in the West Wing demanding access to Treasury computers? Will the Republican Congress allow the two of them to declare a national emergency and suspend the Constitution for a year? The Supreme Court has no army. This fragile system works by common accord, by honoring tradition. When the chopper hit the jet landing at Reagan, the President was supposed to express grief for all those lives. Did he not look at the photographs of the young figure skaters and their families coming back from Wichita, all those bright faces who blew up just short of runway 33? Where is the humanity? Why did he blame Biden and Obama? We don’t expect the leader of our country to be hopelessly trashy.

There’s a story here to be written by you historians in your thirties. As for me, I love my life, the road life, going to Roanoke last Saturday and a theater full of people who, I discovered in the course of two hours, knew three verses of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” by heart, no coaching, plus “It Is Well With My Soul,” “America” and “America the Beautiful.” They sang a cappella and Heather Masse and I sang harmony to them. We did other things and people laughed a lot but that was the part of the show that fed my soul. Southerners singing in harmony.

They laughed when I said, “Canada can’t be our 51st state! It has no South! You can’t have America without a South. You need bluegrass, the blues, country, gospel. You need music.” When corruption and deceit are in the driver’s seat, a person needs to seek out beauty. I watched a video of a girl dancing with a bird perched on her head. I wrote a limerick for her. I walked around Roanoke’s majestic historic downtown. But good Lord, those shining faces upturned, singing about reading His righteous sentence by the flaring lamps, you knew America is still here in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps.

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Please tell me that our current Occupant is not going to take over the Metropolitan Opera and the Lincoln Memorial and the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown and that the Met will continue to do opera and not celebrity tribute shows and Lincoln’s statue will not be given a movable jaw to speak posts from Truth Social and Cooperstown will not switch to enshrining owners of ball clubs.

Let him have the Kennedy Center and turn it into a country pop dinner theater with a motel and casino but please let the Smithsonian continue keeping history and not be purged of history the Occupant doesn’t care for.

Please tell me he does not have the power to rename the Pacific the Terrific Ocean, nor the power to change the rules of baseball to include blocking and tackling. If the National Park Service puts oil derricks in Yellowstone and Yosemite and the Statue of Liberty is made movable and is programmed to shimmy and twirl a baton, that’s okay; I seldom go to New York Harbor or whatever he decides he’d rather call it.

I am among the secular leftist minority who did not vote for him, but 49% of the American people did and God has anointed him to make the country great and we misfits have to get with the program, so if he wishes to eliminate the word “diversity” from the language and also its synonyms — variety, variable, complex, plural, divergent — or words that sound like it — university, adversity, courtesy, artistry, Traverse City — I have to accept this. Take it slow, Mr. Current, one thing at a time. Gulf of America is fine but let us get used to it and leave the names of the 50 states as they are for now. If Indiana should become Melania next week or New Hampshire become Trumpshire, it has an unsettling effect and a person starts to wonder, “Will east still be east tomorrow or will it be south and will I ask Siri to direct me to my office downtown and I’ll wind up at a recycling center in a distant suburb?”

The Occupant likes to capitalize letters as a way of emphasizing the importance of words he likes, such as Mandate and Greatest, which leads me to believe he may have changes in mind for English grammar as a way of making it American since the British can no longer be considered reliable allies in the America First movement so why should they own our language, the language we’ve made “hot”?

I’m sure he’d like to eliminate the past tense and make everything present and give the presidency the sole power to speak in the future tense. The past tense only leads to pissy arguments about factuality that get us nowhere. Now is what matters, not then. Then is gone, wake up to today.

And what is the use of “that” and “which” and “their” and “they’re” and “there”? Let the Department of Grammatical Efficiency purge it — big waste of time and it just gives them elitists a chance to make there corrections their and make us feel inferior. Which is absurd. That is that, from now on. Dump all apostrophes.

Pronouns. Big problem. The answer is to simplify. No more plural pronouns and eliminate pronoun/noun disagreement, one more place where elitist copyeditors, most of them transexuals, like to stick there No. 2 pencil in and correct you. No more of them and those and ours and let’s have singular pronouns from now on and I say, “Let it be him. If God is male, that should be good enough for you.”

I (who am a He) am prepared to go along with all of this and if he wants to make Tennessee Tiffany I say, “God bless him,” and a few baseball owners in Cooperstown is okay too and if the Met wishes to revise “Aida” so Aida and Radames do not die in the tomb, it is a launching pad from which they climb into a rocket and fly to Mars to sing “Y.M.C.A.” and play golf and live forever, okay by me, but a movable talking Lincoln, let’s wait on that, okay? He looks good, sitting, hands on the arms of his chair, silent, thinking things over.

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I seldom invite friends to come to church with me and, after Sunday’s morning service that was so deeply moving, I don’t know why. If you knew a great bakery, you’d tell people. If you read a great book, you wouldn’t keep it a secret. But off I truck to the West Side of Manhattan and in the big door past the greeters, drop my two cents in the offering plate, head altarward, stop at my pew, genuflect and bow, and take my seat.

The genuflection disturbs my fundamentalist ancestors. I can hear them mutter, “Oh please, not that again.” Genuflection they regard as Catholic, papist, alien to the pure faith, and my Anglican church they consider decaffeinated Catholicism, and though I love my ancestors, I tell them to shove off. I know my own heart. This is my home.

I glance at the bulletin and see that I am going to weep this morning because Brother John the organist has chosen my mother’s favorite hymn, “It Is Well With My Soul,” for a Communion hymn. John has brought up our congregation to be a singing congregation; he does this by playing softly and tenderly and relaxing the tempo. Sometimes we sound rather magnificent. Such as in the opening hymn, acolytes processing, candles in hand, the deacons and clergy, all of them women, and we sing “Trust and Obey” at full volume, even I who am neither trustworthy nor obedient.

We acknowledge God from whom no secrets are hid, we recite the Creed, and we acknowledge that we have opposed God’s will in our lives. We are absolved and turn to the people around us, blessing them, and we go forward for Communion, and the Communion hymn reduces me to rubble:

Lord, lift me up, and let me stand

By faith on heaven’s tableland,

A higher plane than I have found.

Lord, plant my feet on higher ground.

My voice shakes and I feel tears on my cheeks, asking my Creator to raise me above the clutter and the cross-talk, the chit-chat, the crapola, and face the heavenly eternal, and accept the unbelievable fact of the faith, that God gave Himself to suffer humiliation and death for our sins. We all do this together. It isn’t a show, we don’t come to admire somebody’s talent and wit, we are joined in one body for each other’s sustenance and inspiration.

The Gospel this morning is one I’ve heard a hundred times, “Do unto others as you wish the bastards would do unto you,” and this is no piece of cake. It says: Love your enemy, bless those who curse you. If someone takes your coat, let them have your shirt too. Do not judge, do not condemn. What the hell? I do not love my enemy. He is Putin’s patsy and so we should let him take Ukraine and let him have Poland and Sweden too? I don’t think so. But this apparently is what Jesus said, that I should love the unelected Nazi who is cutting American aid to starving people in Africa.

So I’ll take that home and wrestle with it for a while. I have confessed my sins as a poor father, a distracted husband, an absentee citizen, and now I recognize my ignorance of the Golden Rule, but then the organ sweeps us into “It Is Well With My Soul” and I weep openly while singing bass:

When peace like a river attendeth my way

And sorrows like sea billows roll,

Whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say,

It is well, it is well with my soul.

And I see my mother, Grace, at the piano in the living room and her six children singing the words. She canned dozens of quarts of stewed tomatoes, green beans, apple sauce, from the garden, and she fixed pot roast and she vacuumed and changed the beds, she laughed at my jokes, and she also played the piano. It’s her song.

I listen to the postlude and shake hands with the rector, thank John for the hymns: it’s not easy to make me weep, I am not that sort of sensitive male, I’m a comedian, this is the work that God has sent me out into the world to do, and I am grateful for the commission. I walked into church thinking about deadlines and the news and my aged ailing pals and I walk out into the sunshine, feeling shaken, raised up, grateful for the love of God and the people around me. I wish you’d come with me sometime.

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I wound up my southern tour in Key West, stayed at an 1836 manse on Truman Street, awoke at 4 a.m. for the flight to Atlanta, then to New York. Stood out on the porch and heard a rooster crowing. The plane, a 737, took off at 7 a.m. The pilot locked the brakes tight, revved up the engine to full power, released the brakes, and we rocketed down the runway and got liftoff with about 90 feet of runway to spare. Exciting. I forgot my belt at TSA security in Key West and hiking through the vast Atlanta airport, trying to manage two bags while keeping my pants from falling down, I probably looked helpless because a young woman pushing a wheelchair stopped and asked if I was okay. I said, “Yes, but I lost my belt and my pants are falling down.”

She was delighted. “I’ve seen that type of thing before,” she said. She hung one bag on the back of the chair, I sat in the seat and held the briefcase, and she got me on the “plane train” to the T Concourse and a men’s store and I bought a belt, then back on the train to Concourse B to catch my flight to LaGuardia. This was my first time ever being pushed in an airport wheelchair; walking in airports is my main exercise. The woman’s name was Zsa Zsa and she was a delight, she called out “Hello, sweetheart” to other wheelchair pushers, she sang out “Chair coming through!” to clear a path onto and off of trains, she called me “Darling,” she said “How’s your day going?” to anyone who looked downcast and suddenly their day improved. She was joy on wheels, and it was illuminating to see how a joyful demeanor and radical courtesy can be a weapon to triumph over the passive aggressions and bad attitudes in public places — you simply couldn’t help but love the woman. She left you no other choice.

I said, “Your mama named you Zsa Zsa because she wanted you to be somebody special and believe me, you exceeded all expectations.” She laughed and set my bags down, wished me a good day and meant it. She didn’t hold out her hand. I’d never taken a wheelchair before and had no idea what to give her so I handed her five twenties and said, “You made my day” and we parted ways.

I come from dour northerners, wary of strangers, defensive, formal, but my pusher lady gave me a lift that lasted for days and sticks with me still even as the tycoons appear to have our government firmly in their grip — did Harry Truman ever sit silently in the Oval Office while J. Paul Getty conducted a press conference five feet away? No, he did not. Tycoons travel by private jet with security men and are met by limos and never encounter a genuinely joyful person like Zsa Zsa, which may explain some of their cruelty.

I came home and got some clue as to Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg & Company, all cursed by insatiable greed: they can never have enough. I spent an hour online trying to cancel an old credit card on which I was still getting charges though I haven’t used it for years. The website was an elaborate maze that made it impossible to cancel. I called the 800 number and got involved with a robotic voice that read directions very rapidly as if it were talking to another computer and not to a human being. Eventually by pressing zero over and over I got shunted off to a human woman. She seemed human though she was trying to sound mechanical. She kept saying that I must call the providers to cancel recurring charges.

I explained that I don’t have their phone numbers. She repeated the directions. I repeated my explanation. Again, directions. Explanation. Mild dementia ensued. I wasted an hour, accomplished nothing, and so will go on paying money to providers who don’t provide anything that I am aware of though my awareness is dulled by the hour of insanity.

This is the world we find ourselves in and in this world Zsa Zsa shines like a beacon. Be joyful, folks. We have a satirist president with a joke Cabinet and a majority party with its pants around its ankles. We’d rather see them than be them. Keep the faith.

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I’ve just finished a ten-day solo tour down South as the World’s Oldest Stand-Up and it was a major adventure for an old guy with memory issues who keeps forgetting the word “cognitive” and other words of a similar sort, walking onstage every night to do ninety minutes or more freestyle in front of a big crowd, most of whom probably voted the wrong way last November, and make them laugh a lot.

A person forgets things at 82. One night I forgot the story about the Butt Grip Contest in Lake Wobegon and it’s not easy to find your way back to a logical point where you can have old Norwegian men drop their trousers and attempt to pick up a 50-cent piece with their bare cheeks. I got this story from Alan Simpson, a Republican senator from Wyoming who was a fan of the show, and it works beautifully and I hate to lose it.

The show is a service to the crowd; it’s not for me to show off. I give them a singing intermission, they stand and sing “America” and “I Saw Her Standing There,” which gives older men the pleasure of singing falsetto OOOOHs and then “O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder consider all the worlds Thy Hands have made,” which brings tears to their eyes. Oftentimes Unitarians have told me afterward how much they enjoyed singing that old Baptist hymn. (When else would they ever get the chance?)

I never mentioned Elon Musk or his friend. I talked about Minnesota winter and the beauty of being 82 and my mother and the adventure of putting on my underwear in the morning without leaning against the wall and all in the interest of lightheartedness.

God tells us to do good but still He

Tells us to lighten our hearts

And lightening includes being silly

And even vulgar, which is good for old farts.

Wound up in Key West for the last show and also stopped by the Ernest Hemingway House and Museum. My mother was upset when she saw me reading A Farewell To Arms when I was 18, afraid it would lead me down the wrong path, which it certainly didn’t. I was never fascinated by death and killing and I never ventured into the long dark hallways of depression. I admired his graceful style and imitated it briefly.

The shows being down South, people enjoyed hearing me talk about Minnesota winter back in my boyhood, waking up on a twenty-below morning, a blizzard in progress, but no mention of school cancellations — back then school cancellation was on the Forbidden list along with atheism, communism, and boys dancing ballet — so I put on my long woolens, ate my Cream of Wheat, and held Mickey our cat who was miserable in winter. His sphincter locked up in the cold and he needed to be massaged to loosen the bladder. That was my job, gently manipulating the genitalia of an elderly cat who could not be shot because it would break the hearts of the little kids and they’d grow up to become criminals.

And then the venture out through the wintry blast to the county road, barely visible in the blowing snow, to wait for the bus, sitting huddled in the ditch, listening for coyotes, watchful for snow snakes slithering under the snow, making slight waves.

My crowd, in their shorts and sandals, enjoyed this, probably thinking it was fictional, the drowsiness of the boy in the ditch, watching for headlights, seeing the dark shapes of buzzards in the bare limbs of trees, big carnivorous birds watching me, waiting, and if for some reason the bus does not appear — this was before children had cellphones, we were beyond rescue — could I defend myself against the sharp beaks of a flock of hungry birds?

It was a good show, with jokes and poetry and a sexual awakening and pond hockey and the grimness of Ecclesiastes and the goodness of aunts and girl cousins, plus the singing and the buzzards, and I felt it was a genuine public service. No mention of Musk or Vance, no mention of constitutional issues, carbon emissions, climate change. Call me a coward but I saw my job as giving them an evening of freedom. When you can get Unitarians to sing joyfully about the Second Coming, you’ve accomplished some good in the world. I wish my mother had been there.

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I never cared for Valentine’s Day as a kid, when we had to address a valentine to everyone in the classroom, Miss Moehlenbrock’s rule, so that every child would feel equally important — she was a true liberal, but the idea of universal fondness didn’t ring true for me, and clearly some valentines were more equal than others. Some valentines have integrity and the others are torn on dotted lines from a sheet of eight. I got a lot of those.

I was fond of Corinne and Christine because they were big readers and had been to New York City, which I had not. But the Valentine message –— “I love you, please be mine” –— wasn’t the right one. Possession wasn’t my aim.

Solomon was a romantic guy and he wrote, “Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the fields; let us go out early to the vineyards, and see whether the vines have budded, whether the grape blossoms have opened and the pomegranates are in bloom.” The guy just wanted to check his garden, but the woman took it as a proposal so Sol wound up with a thousand wives. A thousand wedding pictures, a thousand women saying, “Why are you so silent this morning? What did I do? Are you involved with another woman?” (Yes, 999 of them.) He had a thousand kitchens because what woman would share a kitchen with another woman and have to keep rearranging the cupboards? His book in the Bible, the Song of Solomon, was his way of sending an SOS.

I know about this because I’ve been married more often than you have. I fell in love with women because I saw myself as a rescuer — I rode in on a white horse and found a beautiful woman beset by loneliness and having trouble with her a.c. and I dismounted and fixed the problem and she threw herself in my arms. I rescued her from her small mean town and took her to my castle on the hill and naturally expected her to be delighted and for a few weeks she was and then one morning she said, “You were snoring loudly last night and I hate to mention it but you keep missing the toilet when you pee. And you go around humming the same Grateful Dead song and I wish you’d change the tune. Please.”

I rescued her from despair and made her my Queen and now she’s my editor. I galloped into her life and helped her up in the saddle behind me, her arms around me, whispering endearments in my ear as we rode through the Garden of Eden and then she says, “I think you were supposed to turn left back there” and she googles it and Siri says, “Yes, you should have turned left.”

Time passed. The horse died. I sold the castle. I use the sword now to chop greens for the salad. The escutcheon is a serving tray. Everything has changed. A tribe of digital geniuses has invaded, heroic nerds who swoop down on beautiful women in the library who are agonizing over a term paper they accidentally deleted and now, all hope lost, their career in veterinary aromatherapy dangling in the balance, young Derek recovers the file from iCloud and also shows her how to reformat complex interdependent functions into coded extended templates and she throws herself into his arms and okay, maybe his intelligence is artificial and his kisses formulaic, but she is moved by his problem-solving and maybe she marries him. I’m sure it happens all the time.

On Valentine’s Day, however, we poets have an edge. Derek thinks of the heart as a matrix and love as input with no downside, a win-win situation, which does not touch her heart, but the poet steps forward and spreads the embroidered cloths of heaven under her feet, cloths enwrought with golden and silver light, the blue and the dim and the dark cloths of night and light and the half-light, and even though he works at Burger King and lives in his parents’ basement, she cannot resist him. Language is the heart of love.

You may snore and pee on the floor but if you can write a good poem for her, you’ll be okay, pal. Write her a poem. Don’t text it. Write it on paper with a pen and she will come live with you and be your love midst valleys, woods, and fields and you will all the pleasures prove that this brief summer yields.

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