Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 62

Spring has not quite arrived where we are (New York) though there are intimations of it and on Sunday we sat outdoors with neighbors, maintaining a six-foot gap, and spoke of various things and had a good time. I’m a Minnesotan, not a New Yorker, but I do love New Yorkers’ willingness to say what’s on their mind. A woman at church once told me during coffee hour that she never liked my radio show and we became instant friends on that basis. She said it in a friendly way, and frankly I’m not a huge fan of myself either, so right away we have something in common. On the other hand, a New York guy told me Saturday on the phone, “I love you. You know that.” A Minnesotan wouldn’t have said it if you’d put a gun to his head.

Last fall I went to the opera and during intermission headed for the men’s room, passing a long line of women waiting to get into the women’s, and inside the men’s, I saw a tall woman in a long black coat emerge from a stall and walk out. She didn’t linger to hold a press conference, she simply walked out, having done what she needed to do. In Minnesota, this would’ve been an international incident; in New York, no big deal. Architects favor symmetry so the Men’s and Women’s are equal but men require three square feet and fifteen seconds to pee, and women need fifteen square feet and may have pantyhose to deal with and they like to converse. Conversation in a men’s room is strictly taboo. So the line of women is three times as long. Equality isn’t equity. And this woman stepped out of line. Point made.

This pandemic makes Bernie Sanders look good and I speak as a Sleepy Joe Democrat. Our lives depend on millions of people who are not treated decently, including the undocumented workers picking the strawberries in California that I put on my corn flakes. We hear the sirens go by, a deadly disease that respects no boundaries. We see the naked socialism in the federal bailout of business. We’re living in a socialist state like Sweden except they do it rationally and we do it in lurches.

I had about twenty uncles and all of them were Republicans. They equated Republicanism with competence and common sense. Watching the nightly news, it is no longer possible to see Republicanism in that way. It’s the party of autocratic impulse, cynicism and anger. None of my uncles would recognize it anymore. In the Eisenhower administration, Trump would be ambassador to Liechtenstein.

November is six months away, meanwhile we wash our hands and shop online and keep in touch and go to bed early. I lie in the dark next to the dear woman working a crossword puzzle on her iPhone and I touch her bare arm and shoulder and she murmurs. Then I close my eyes and take myself back to 1947 and Uncle Jim’s farm, the Model T in the yard, the cows in the pasture by the brook, the horses in their enclave. I wash my face under the hand pump and come in for breakfast, Post Toasties and Grandma’s bread, and she and I and Uncle Jim read from Scripture and he prays for the Lord’s mercy to be upon us and then he hitches up the team, Prince and Ned, and I walk out the door and he lifts me up on Scout’s back. I’m five years old, sitting on the broad back, my face in his mane, the big ears twitching above, and Uncle Jim clicks his tongue and the team leans into the traces and the hayrack bumps along toward the meadow where we’ll rake up hay. By the time we get through the gate and beyond the windbreak, I am asleep.

It was a runaway team of horses that might’ve killed young John Keillor but did not, which convinced him to marry young Grace Denham, and that’s where I come from. I ride this horse into unconsciousness and then it’s morning and I sit down to work. On the Titanic, a passenger stood on deck that night and thought, “The old man doesn’t know what he’s doing and there will be dozens of books written about this and I won’t live to read them.” I hope to live long enough to read about this disaster.

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A windy Sunday in New York and I attended virtual church and heard Father George’s homily about doubting Thomas and the rightness of skepticism and got to look over the organist’s shoulder for the prelude and postlude.

Here’s to the skeptics like Thomas,

Who examine colons and commas

And carefully judge

Up close by touch

Before they accept the Lord’s promise.

During virtual coffee hour I met Patty who told me she’d tried to listen to my radio show back in the Nineties but it just didn’t speak to her, she preferred Prince and the Femmes at the time. She said it in a friendly way and I took it the same. I love this about New York, that people feel free to say what they think and this makes their friendship more valuable. We were in little boxes on Zoom and Zoom is a great discovery of the pandemic, a friendly medium. My daughter loves it. Yesterday she was Zooming for hours and Zoomed herself into a state of exhaustion and went to bed at 7 without supper, meanwhile we sat outdoors with our neighbors Richard and Gretchen who brought fabulous cookies made from Skippy’s, brown sugar, eggs and something else but not flour. We spoke of many things and Gretchen showed us how she could touch her forehead to her knees. She’s a flutist and she and Jenny have been friends going way back to their free-lance music days. Richard is a fellow English major which, English majoring being in such steep decline, is a bond, like submarine service or growing up on a potato farm. He and I thrive on isolation, the two women crave society.

The dark side of isolation is that I must confront myself. I have met the enemy and he is me. Messiness, laziness, dullness, resistance to good advice, forgetting to floss, the old habits. I’ve known it since I lived alone in an apartment that turned into a fetid swamp. Now I look at all I’ve written, conveniently stored in my hard drive, and I want to throw the computer into the river. In prose, I have a weakness for flatness. For platitudes. It comes from a midwestern upbringing: Don’t rock the boat, don’t think you’re special. But for the reader’s sake, you better be special, otherwise why bother? My big regret about forty years of PHC was the lack of invention and craziness. But at 77, I hope for better things. I’m a farmer, at heart. Persistence. And now I’ve gotten a brilliant critique of my memoir from a freelance editor who is 40. Four pages of insightful criticism from someone who is enthused about the book but also clear-sighted. This is pure gold. And now I am happy to go back to work. Blessings on you and yours. Spring is on the way. Improve the day.

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It has been a quiet week in apartment 12B. I am isolating, trying to write, and the other two are reaching out electronically to the entire civilized world. Maia and her dozens of friends all go on Zoom simultaneously, nobody’s left out, no cliques, and she disappears into a vortex of chatter and laughter, and I sit and write limericks.

Easter was sort of a joke.

He was buried and then He awoke.

His rod and His staff

Remind me to laugh

Which I’ll do til the day that I croak.

I look at the Times but skip the front page and Opinion pages so as to avoid impotent rage and I open to the Lifestyle section and see the headline, “Interrupted Sleep May Lead To Dementia” and don’t read that and there’s an article about Montepulciano wine and the line “Fresh and vivacious with chewy tannins and bursts of flowers and fruits.” Chewing on tannins? I don’t think so. I work on my memoir and novel and it’s rather pleasant. Of course there’s loneliness and despair, a sense of meaninglessness —- welcome to the club. In our isolation, I’ve discovered the extent of big biographies on my shelves that I have no interest in reading (sorry, Robert Caro!), dishes I’ll never use, clothes I’ll never wear — if they expect us consumers to bring the economy back, count me out. I’m going for simplicity. Meanwhile, spring is coming, almost. The trees on our terrace are leafing, sort of. And so will we, maybe. When we’re released from isolation, we’ll find intense pleasure in the crowded streets, roaming around the city the way we used to do. The first ballgame will be pure euphoria. We just need something to look forward to. You can endure a lot if there is some lovely thing on your calendar out there in the future. My grandson Charlie graduates on June 7 and heads for San Francisco to study to become an architect. I have a show in San Antonio September 10 and I’ll walk out and sing “My country ’tis of thee” and they’ll all join in, all fifteen of them sitting fifteen feet apart. Hope. It’s almost all you need. Those of you who are incarcerated felons have a release date to look forward to and a halfway house. Those of you in assisted living have the next dosage of Atavan. Those of you in Oklahoma —- maybe you have a trip to Kansas coming up or Arkansas. And you Republicans —- come November, you won’t have to defend him anymore. It’s been exhausting for you. Now you can take up alligator wrestling or enter a taco-eating contest or a triathlon, or how about you sail a little boat across the Atlantic to Sweden and crusade in favor of coal-burning power plants. As for me, I’m 77 and I have to get to work on this novel. I’m hoping for September publication, right after San Antonio, and I’ll set up a table on Lyndale Avenue, past the I-94 exit, with a big sign, Novel $3, Free Autograph. Personal counseling for no additional charge.

We will arise from bed with a whole heart

And life will bloom like the cherry tree

And you will make each day into a work of art

And your kids will flower magnificently.

You will be beautiful, re-created,

And fly higher for having been isolated.

The post The News from Manhattan: Sunday, April 19, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

It was bright and chilly in New York yesterday and we three had a fine day. The violist watched a documentary on the violinist Itzhak Perelman and the student attended online classes and I wrote a dirty limerick about a Bible college.

A divinity major at Bethel

Vowed to love Julie til death’ll

Part him from her

And married they were

Until he got hot pants for Ethel.

I also worked on a memoir and spoke to a friend who recalled capturing a grasshopper in her childhood and naming it Greenie and putting it in a glass jar with grass inside and holes punched in the lid. She left the jar outdoors and it rained and Greenie drowned. She’d been carrying this in her heart for sixty years and was still feeling bad about it. What I discover in this pandemic is that electronics (iPhone, Zoom, Google, text) facilitate communication fabulously. (I was once in radio: why am I only discovering this now?) I come from taciturn people. In person, we clam up, but you put a phone in our hand and we speak from the heart. We need another six months of quarantine and, yes, the economy will be in ruins but we will all love our neighbors as ourselves and maybe our relatives too.

What hurts me is the absence of baseball. I should be walking through the turnstile at the ballpark — there’s a special gate for us with pacemakers and the guards know me there — and taking a right turn toward Kramarczuk’s bratwurst stand and then out to right field for a seat with a great view of the whole pasture and sitting out there for nine innings, watching two teams with nine men on a side, three outs to a half inning, three strikes and you’re out, the world starts to make sense. Your team is in trouble, the ace is struggling on the mound, runners at the corners, three balls, no strikes, and he throws and the batter tops one to the shortstop, a flip to second base, then first, a double play — salvation. I hate to think of a summer without this. The things which I have seen, I now can see no more?? Really? Then there hath past away a glory from the earth.

The world is full of sad stories. Long before Columbus, Leif Eriksson explored the coast of New England, though it wasn’t called that at the time, and saw the island of Manahatta, which was very pretty, but they didn’t come ashore and try to buy it for $23 worth of junk jewelry — the Vikings were free spirits, explorers — they came, they saw, they went home — so it was the pirate Columbus who planted the flag, though he had no idea where he was, nonethelesss he got the holiday in October, the capital of Ohio, a major river in the Northwest, a university on Manahatta. And the Dutch came and the English Puritans and everything went downhill.

Had Leif stuck around, this would be a very different country. Think Minnesota multiplied by fifty. We’d have universal health care and a highly developed system of state socialism. Vikings are a calm and reasonable people, they don’t go around yelling “Make Norway Great Again,” they’re sailors and given to buoyancy, not domination. Pandemics don’t start there, herring don’t carry viruses, at least the pickled ones don’t. We’d have a modest intelligent premier, very likely a woman, and a legislature with seven or eight parties, no arrogant majority Testosterone party, and life would be marvelously adequate and good enough. But that’s not what happened and here we are in a fix. But let us do what we can to improve the day and please don’t trap a grasshopper in a jar with a lid. Beware of Ethel. And speak kindly to each other.

The post The News from Manhattan: Friday, April 17, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

I woke up this morning feeling grateful, I’m healthy, I’m with people I love, what more do I want? You can shoot me for saying it but cheerfulness is a prime American virtue going back to Ralph Waldo Emerson and his Unitarian pals and then all those hopeful immigrants escaping sour cramped lives to bring up their kids in Brooklyn and Chicago and though I was brought up by dour Brethren and I tried to be a seriously depressed poet, I made a U-turn when I got a job in radio. I was hired to do the 6 a.m. M-F shift and I knew that I got the job because nobody else wanted it. It became my education. My job was to be cheerful and, if possible, amusing and even hilarious. I’d never done that before. I was 27. So my life changed at that point. Laughter doesn’t come naturally to me: it’s like bouncing a meatball. I grew up in a kitchen with a sign over the table, “Christ Is The Invisible Guest At Every Meal, the Silent Listener to Every Conversation.” This doesn’t encourage the telling of Ole & Lena jokes. I wrote a cheery post yesterday and got some flak for it, somebody called me a “positivity bully,” which is okay by me. We’re in a very strange period and it’s a free country so say what you think. And I say we need to take lemons and make lemonade and make apples into appliances. Nobody knows what summer and fall will be like. We may come out of this a different country. So let’s talk about what we want. First of all, the goon with the hairdo is done. He gave us blithering corruption with murderous incompetence. And a lot of his enablers are going down with his ship. With Biden in the White House and Democratic majorities in Congress, it’s time to call a Constitutional Convention and shake the country up.

First of all, is there a reason for Wyoming to exist as a state? Two Senate seats for a half-million dimestore cowboys while California gets two seats for 39 million people? Alaska is a wonderful tourist destination, ditto Hawai’i but both should be returned to indigenous people, and so should Wyoming. And frankly, Utah, Texas, and Vermont have never been comfortable as part of the pluribus unum. Attach Nevada to Utah and make a lovely little desert nation, let Vermont join Canada, and make Texas a Republic. Add Oklahoma to it. Join Rhode Island and New Hampshire, make Idaho part of Montana, and combine North and South Dakota into one state called West Minnesota. Divide California in two. Consolidation goes on all the time in corporate America and it achieves great efficiencies. So we wind up with forty states. Twenty seats vacated in the U.S. Senate and let’s give them to former presidents and old generals and some leading historians. Now you’ve got a truly contemplative body. After the pandemic, Universal Medicare will pass on a voice vote. Biden serves one term and his V-P runs in 2024. Some good names have been put forward and I’m going to add one more to the list. Fran Lebowitz. Our first Lebanese vice-president, a woman who smokes and has never owned a cellphone. The woman who said, “Very few people possess true artistic ability. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass.” If not vice-president, make her chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is a humanist of the first water. God bless America. Have a good day.

The post The News from Manhattan: Thursday, April 16, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

So some people find self-isolation boring, okay, I get that, but if this is the MOST boring time of your life, you’re lucky, toots, and you didn’t grow up Plymouth Brethren and you never coached kid hockey and you never sat in a big motorboat as it churns along and your host has a schooner of Scotch in hand, and he’s woofing about how much he loves this, meanwhile his wife is cursing under her breath and their two grandchildren are whining Why can’t we go back to Reptile World? And the sun is beating down and turning your brains to butterscotch pudding. Some men must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky, and I prefer my own kitchen. Pandemic? Fine. Or if you live in Minnesota and beget progeny, you run the risk of kid hockey and having to chauffeur a six-year-old to practice MWF 4 a.m. and three games on the weekend, because no kids skate on outdoor ice anymore, a little known aspect of global warming and ice time in practice arenas is expensive, you’re looking at $1000 for a season per kid plus $500 worth of skates and pads and gloves and you’re sitting in front of a bunch of hockey moms yelling “HUSTLE HUSTLE HUSTLE!!– HIT HIM. HIT HIM. BACKCHECK! DIG-DIG-DIG!!!. When I was a kid, we flooded a backyard and used old magazines for shinpads and a wheelbarrow for a goal and no adults were in sight —- but that’s all gone now. If you’re lucky, your kid’ll get dinged a few times and lose interest and take up writing poetry that’s dark and moody and vaguely psychopathic, but meanwhile you are in hockey hell. Believe me, sweetheart, the parents of hockey kids are LOVING this pandemic, it’s a highlight.

As for Plymouth Brethren, these are separatist fundamentalist evangelicals but beyond that, these are Old Testament Christians who much prefer Deuteronomy and Leviticus to the gospel of John and they sit in Sunday afternoon Bible Reading and drone about numerology and symbolism and if you’re a kid with an active mind, this is solitary confinement. I know, I wound up in grad school in a seminar on Milton’s Paradise Lost and that was hell itself. I did it in order to keep my student deferment but I would have enjoyed the Army a lot more.

So don’t give up the ship, people. This pandemic has a purpose and that is to throw Donald J. Trump out of the White House and over the fence. The man has a quarter-billion dollar campaign fund but that is not going to save him. He is doing himself in on a daily basis. His boasting and ignorance and childish insults at the daily press briefing — Joe Biden doesn’t need to say a thing, Trump is beating himself. As the pandemic spreads to red rural America and the Confederacy and people dealing with serious disease watch an idiot president on TV, Joe’s job is done for him. America is capable of doing the right thing. Don’t underestimate us. Remember 2008? We elected a Chicago guy with a Harvard degree, the middle name Hussein, and a sense of humor —- he said, “I’ve got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I’ve got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher.” The day after the election, the French minister of human rights said, “On this morning, we all want to be American so we can take a bite of this dream unfolding before our eyes.” THINK OF IT: a Frenchman saying he wanted to be American and take a bite of something of ours. We were admired by Danes and Swedes! Chicago became cool. The man could talk, he could write, he could be funny. And then a fat-ass from Queens was elected a make-believe president and suddenly you didn’t care to go to Europe anymore and be asked about him. It was only twelve years ago we elected the smart guy. We’re fundamentally the same nation we were then. Have hope. That is all. God bless you today. DISMISSED.

The post The News from Manhattan: Wednesday, April 15, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

I come from people who anticipate the worst so this quarantine is right up my alley. My mother, every Sunday morning as we left for church, imagined she had left the iron on and that our house would go up in flames. I always assumed I would die young until I got too old to die young but I still have a lingering fear of putting my tongue on a clothespole in January and being frozen to it and firemen will come and yank me loose and I’ll speak with a lisp for years thereafter. I expect to step off a curb on Columbus Avenue and be run down by a deliveryman on a bike and die with a carton of shrimp in garlic sauce on my chest.

I try, for the sake of my wife and daughter, to keep up a cheerful front but I am my mother’s son. I share her Scots heritage. Scotland is where golf was invented, a game that shows us the worst aspect of ourselves. Bluegrass comes from Scots, songs like “Let Your Teardrops Kiss The Flowers On My Grave” and “The Fatal Wedding” (“The bride, she died at the altar, The bridegroom died next day. The parson dropped dead in the churchyard as he was about to pray.”) Someone told me once, “If one of them isn’t dead by the third verse, it ain’t bluegrass.”

I’ve been severely criticized the past few weeks for writing about how happy I feel at a time when there is death all around us in New York City and doctors and nurses are wracked with anxiety and exhaustion, but that’s exactly the point: grief belongs to those who are in real trouble and though I expect to fall into despair, it hasn’t happened yet and so the privilege of anguish is not mine to enjoy. I used to be a tortured artist who wrote anguished surrealistic poetry and, by George, I could do it again, but I haven’t been so moved.

These days, I skip the front page of the New York Times and jump to the obituaries. Here is Al Kaline, the Detroit Tigers star, and songwriter John Prine and also Vince Lionti, 60, violist in the Met Opera orchestra for thirty years and conductor of the Westchester Youth Symphony who once said his greatest musical experience was conducting the symphony, 101 players, at a school for the deaf and the deaf kids sat on the stage amid the orchestra and laughed out loud as they felt Beethovenly vibrations. I grieve for the obituarized. And I am happy not to be there myself.

And then, on Sunday, on a Zoom chat with family, my wife, Jenny, said out loud, “I feel no need to leave the apartment.” This was such a loving thing, on the order of “to love and cherish until death us do part.” She’s often told me that she loves me and needs me but never after a month of seclusion with me. To say, “I feel no need to leave the apartment” is to say, “I feel no urge to strangle you in your sleep and grab a cab and catch a flight to Lisbon.” That’s what a Scot who loves bluegrass would expect and it isn’t so. So I’m happy.

She also said, last night, “I miss the world,” which I can understand. I don’t. I try to miss it but it hasn’t happened yet. The monastic life is a peaceful life, and I’m a writer and I’ve been trying to self-isolate since I was in my mid-twenties. I feel desperate when I imagine not having a major league baseball season but that hasn’t been announced yet. Meanwhile, I work on my novel, The Fatal Quarantine, in which a young couple cooped up in a tiny co-op apartment get on each other’s nerves over time because he is of a pleasant disposition and she is about to go berserk and she opens up his computer while he sleeps and finds the novel he’s writing in which the hero is putting strychnine in his wife’s stir-fry so he can marry the neighbor lady whose bedroom faces their kitchen and one night, when he gets up to pee, she leads him half-asleep to the window and shoves him out. They live on the twelfth floor. A year from now, this is going to be No. 1 on the fiction list and she and I are going to get us a bigger apartment on the eighteenth. You just wait and see.

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It’s Easter today at St. Mike’s,

A festive day everyone likes,

But today it’s on Zoom

And we’ll sit in our room

And watch in our underwear, yikes!

It’s very simple: if the sun shines, we’ll be happy. That’s what spring comes down to, the hunger for light. Church of the Sacred Zoom is odd, of course, especially today, to not be in a packed sanctuary with people wearing bright yellows and greens, and see the tall solemn teenage acolytes come down the aisle carrying their candles high, but it’s still Easter and He still is risen. We spoke by Zoom with a young couple in Brooklyn yesterday and it was great fun, a terrific conversation ranging over many subjects, very light-hearted, and after 40 minutes, as conversation starts to wane, you just say, “Well, I think we’d better let you good people resume your life now” and everybody says goodbye and that’s it. I think virtuality is the wave of the future. But we have to get back together for Christmas, don’t we? Nobody knows when theaters might reopen and it’s hard to imagine New York without theater and opera and dance and music and all that excitement in Midtown every evening— without Broadway, New York’d just be another corporate headquarters with taller office buildings — but it may take awhile for it to revive and maybe we’ll just be watching TV for the next year. The beautiful part of the Zoom call today was when the young couple said they’re thinking of starting a family and wondering if they want to raise kids in Minnesota or in Paris. It’s heartening to think of people wanting to have kids in this strange era we live in — faith in the future raising its head — and now I’m planning to live long enough to see those kids grow up a little. Meanwhile, I’m going to finish this memoir so that if the kids want to earn about radio, they can. I keep saying I’m almost done, and now I really mean it. Monday I am shipping it off and you won’t hear me complain about it anymore. We’re making today’s dinner be a Thanksgiving dinner because we feel grateful to be together and healthy, so we’ll have turkey (actually chicken) and stuffing and pumpkin pie. Praise be to God for His steadfast love, even if sometimes we’re searching for answers. Happy Easter, or Passover, or both, which would be Passter, and I’m eager to hear her homily today. She’s obliged to bring a message of hope and do it in twelve minutes. Good luck, Kate!

The post The News from Manhattan: Sunday, April 12, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Good Friday and the wind is moaning in the windows of 12B. I joined Morning Prayer on Zoom but the reading was too dark — “My mouth tastes of ashes,” that sort of lamentation — so I dropped out. We Sanctified Brethren didn’t observe Holy Week — for us, Lent was a year-round thing —and Jenny has painful childhood memories of the season, and then there’s the fact that, in this pandemic, we feel wildly fortunate to be secure in our apartment, the three of us, so mournfulness feels like an act.

He doesn’t feel sad on Good Friday.

His life is warm, sweet and tidy.

His loved ones nearby,

A coffee supply,

And it says “humorist” on his I.D.

Jenny woke up early this morning and said, “I don’t think we’re leaving here anytime soon,” but in a cheerful tone. I keep checking with friends and they all seem resilient and upbeat. Self-isolation with Jenny and Maia seems more like a reward than punishment. I lived a frantic busy life for a couple decades when I flew around the country like a crazed bat and this spring is the opposite of that, a simple peasant life in Manhattan and prose is my cash crop and we seldom look at the clock and the woman runs the show. I have work to do and that’s my good luck, made possible by mediocre grades that kept me out of med school and any skilled profession. A person’s life hangs on small ironies. And here we are. I now go back to writing my Lake Wobegon novel about the cheese epidemic. Some think it’s caused by WiFi and others think it’s a Catholic conspiracy and some think it can be prevented by upping your daily beer intake. It’s good to meet the Krebsbachs and Bunsens and Magendanzes under more dramatic circumstances. The old radio monologues tended to be sort of sleepy, I think. God bless all and color your eggs golden.

The post The News from Manhattan: Friday, April 10, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

I skipped the news today and clicked on Zoom where my church held Morning Prayer for Holy Week and there we all were in little boxes on the screen, like pastries on the grocery shelf, and we prayed for forgiveness — though in self-isolation, there’s not much lust or anger, just gluttony and sloth, the usual — and I prayed for my friends who are alone, the one who said, “This is a great time for introverts” and the one who told me she’d instructed her doorman that, if she dies, she should be hauled away in a cardboard box and cremated, no ceremony.

Meanwhile, it is spring in New York City. Bright green grass is growing in the planter boxes on our balcony and a loud bird is hanging out there. We are three people isolating ourselves in five rooms, one reading, one Facetiming, one typing these words. We have groceries, running water, WiFi, all the necessities, and we’re on the 12th floor and can open a door and sit outside in the sunshine, the ultimate luxury.

It’s an easy life compared to what many people are going through and skipping the news lets you ignore a president who, as the British writer Nate White points out, “has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honor and no grace” and now, in a national crisis, shows himself to be an ignorant  bumbler and con artist focused on weeding out non-yes-men in the White House.

The Founders never considered this. They provided for impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors but not for blinkered stupidity. So we must depend on the heroes in our midst, the hospital workers and truck drivers and grocery clerks and crucial employees, the people the Queen thanked in her speech, to get us through the next few weeks or months until, God help us, the rate of infection declines and life can resume.

In the summer of 1942, the year I was born, a terrible storm hit my hometown in Minnesota and our cousin Florence Hunt ran out of her house with a baby in hand as a tornado blew the roof off and blew mother and child into the limbs of a tree. She climbed down, bruised, the baby unhurt, and took shelter next door at her father-in-law Rozel’s whose father had died of TB when Rozel was a boy. My aunt Jo lived nearby on a farm where my father almost broke his neck his team of four horses got spooked and took off at a wild gallop. His cousin Joe Loucks drowned in the Rum River and my father and his brothers formed a human chain but couldn’t save him.  My father who, as a boy, looked out the schoolhouse window and saw his family’s house burning down.

My people were no strangers to disaster. I grew up knowing strong farm women who had driven tractors and handled guns and slaughtered chickens and dealt with troubled men and as a child I could sense their capability. They set high standards but practiced forgiveness. Florence was a cheerful woman and once she’d been blown into a tree, she was fearless. My mother was a worrier and every time she left the house she imagined she’d left the iron on and the house would burn down. The tornado did Florence some good.

My school, Anoka High School, adopted that storm of 1942 as a symbol and our teams became the Anoka Tornadoes. Other teams were named for zoo animals, bears or lions, but we intended to cause devastation. My university, Minnesota, was named for a burrowing rodent, but never mind that. These are brands, and they mean less than nothing. Washington is full of men who think in terms of branding and study opinion polls to gauge their own credibility. Churchill didn’t do that in 1940 as Britain stood on the brink. We don’t need it either. Our country is in trouble and it lacks coherent leadership and this obligates us to extend ourselves to each other. Love your neighbor. Gather your family close. Prepare for hard times ahead. Pledge allegiance to each other. This country is so much better than it appears these days. Now is the time to come to its aid, before it sinks.

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