Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 64

I drove to the grocery the other night and there, near checkout, saw a freezer case with the sign, “Artisan Ice Cubes,” a bold new step in our march toward Preposterosity. I asked the checkout guy if maybe the sign meant to say “Artesian” and he wasn’t interested. Word usage is not his responsibility. To me, artisanal ice is in the same category as organic non-GMO ice cubes. I’m a Minnesotan and I appreciate the beauty of frost and snow but an ice cube is an ice cube.

I drove home and saw a man and a woman alone together on a neighborhood ice rink, skating as a pair, side by side, arms crossed, and I slowed down to watch. He swung in front of her and turned, skating backward, holding her by one hand as she lifted her back leg and struck a pose, then they turned in a wide arc, paired up again, and did a figure eight. They were in their sixties, no longer sylphlike, and this public display of artisanal skating was very romantic. Made me think of bell-bottoms in the Seventies and Elvis’s muttonchops.

This is the spirit that draws people to the opera. We live in the Age of Numb Disbelief, but the opera is one place where the heart speaks and passion rules and Aida descends into the tomb with her lover, who has been sentenced to death; she cannot live without him so she must perish with him. Meanwhile, they sing a gorgeous long duet that if you leave early to avoid traffic, you are missing the whole point.

I come from a family of Calvinists, my wife from a family of violinists. Twenty-five years ago, she and I were living together while my divorce went through and I brought her out to Minnesota to meet my elderly parents, I the scapegrace son bringing my illicit lover, and she, whose family are huggers, walked up to my mother and threw her arms around her neck and held her close and then did the same to my father, and that was that, they loved her from that moment on. Rational discussion wouldn’t have accomplished what she did with her own warm heart. When I came home from the artisanal ice cubes, she did something similar to me and, old as I am and slow afoot, it was thrilling. The full frontal embrace of the woman you love — let’s face it — can make a man forget about Ukraine and obstruction of justice.

The impeachment of Bill Clinton was so much more appealing than what we’re seeing now. It involved temptations of the flesh and who hasn’t been there? What we have here is a drug deal. A bundle of cash for a load of OxyContin. The Clinton impeachment had possibilities as a movie musical. This one? I don’t think so.

So when I got home (where we have our own ice cube maker, which is purely mechanical, not artisanal) and the woman embraced me and held on, it put the U.S. Senate entirely out of mind and made me want to go get my skates (which I do not have) and take her to an ice rink and do some figures in the dark. I’m a Minnesotan. Wrestling with girls in the snow was my earliest erotic experience. I was nine and “erotic” was not in my vocabulary but I knew that I was tangling with a mystery that would only get more and more interesting.

This is where the word “artisan” truly belongs, with matters of the heart, not with solid water. Every romantic engagement is a work of art and craft, especially a long and happy marriage. We walk into a room to find the other and we gracefully engage. The verbal back-and-forth has a cadence and music that is unique to us. We have our private laugh lines. I stand behind her as she makes a salad and put my hands on her shoulders, my two thumbs pressing on either side of her spine, and she says, “Lower,” and sighs with pleasure. I tell her about the artisan ice cubes at the grocery and it’s of no interest to her, she is engaged with her lover’s hands on her back. I’m an old man but I am an artisan when it comes to her shoulders. Now my job is to convince her to fly away with me to England in April when daisies pied and violets blue paint the meadows with delight. I could use a delightful meadow at this point.

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I stood around looking at J.D. Salinger stuff last Friday, his old black Royal typewriter, family snapshots, and typewritten letters, at the New York Public Library, and it was a wonder to see. I’m one of the many millions for whom The Catcher in the Rye was an important book back in my teens and back then, Salinger was famous for guarding his privacy. He didn’t do interviews, was never on TV, and so was portrayed in the press as a crank, an anti-social weirdo. It’s clear from the exhibit that he was not.

He seems quite content, raising his vegetables, writing beautiful letters to his son, Matthew, studying in France, writing to an Army buddy with whom he shared a jeep during the Battle of the Bulge, writing at length to a 14-year-old reader named Laura in Huntington, WV. She had not included a return address and Salinger called Information in Huntington and got it. I speak for all his readers when I say I’m glad we were wrong about him. He was a sweet and happy man.

It did occur to me that Cornish, NH, was not a good place to live if you wanted anonymity. Reporters went to the town, talked to Salinger’s neighbors, his mailman, tried to dredge up tales about him, but if he’d stayed in New York, he’d have been better off. Anonymity is New York’s gift to us all.

I was in the library to sit in the magnificent Rose Reading Room, one of my favorite rooms in America, where a writer can sit and work at a long table under a magnificent high ceiling, in the company of a couple hundred others, most of them younger, working on Lord knows what. I’m working on a memoir, Lord knows why. Nobody bothers you there. I work until the library closes at 5:45 and make my way east on 42nd Street to Grand Central Station and down the ramp to the Oyster Bar and get a little red-checked table in the corner and order five bluepoints and coleslaw and broiled sea bass. Solitary supper, reading the paper, a great luxury.

I walk through the throng and remember when I came here with my dad in 1953. I was 11, a Minnesota kid on my first trip to the big city. I wandered away from him and it scared him, the thought that I might get lost, and he ran and grabbed my hand, and I still remember the feeling I got — that my dad loved me. He’d never say it, of course, but he did. I remember him as I walk through the station and head downstairs to the Times Square shuttle to take me to the uptown C train.

Dad was a train man and New York is a city of trains. Without the vast network of underground lines, the city would die. I like the company of New Yorkers on trains, their keen awareness of surroundings, their remarkable politeness. Once on the uptown One, I met a young guy from Texas who’d been at the same piano recital I’d been at and heard a Philip Glass sonata that sounded unGlass-like, melodic, more like Richard Strauss. We discussed that for a mile and he got off. The subway, the Rose Reading Room, the Oyster Bar — citadels of solitude. Salinger could’ve been quite happy here. I once saw Philip Roth walking in Central Park and nobody bothered him. He looked at me, I nodded, he nodded back. Who needs more?

I went to the ER once, about a year ago. My right knee hurt so that I could hardly put weight on it. I took a cab to Mt. Sinai St. Luke’s on 114th. I took a number and waited. The ER was crowded with anonymous people, most of them in worse shape than I. Three hours later, I was X-rayed and after a short wait, a doctor told me nothing was broken, I was okay to go. She was kind, thoughtful, friendly, and I looked at her name tag and decided to invade her privacy. I asked her to pronounce her name, she did, and I wrote:

The ER doc Elise Levine

Is dealing with chaos just fine;

Your calm expertise

And kindness, Elise,

Bring the Upper West Side some sunshine

In the shadow of St. John Divine.

Nobody had written a poem for her before, she said. She was touched. I thanked her and walked home. The beauty of solitude is that it makes each encounter so memorable. Dr. Levine, the music student from Texas, my dad taking my hand.

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Winter is a thoughtful time. Snow falls in the trees and my natural meanness dissipates and the urge to bash my enemies’ mailboxes with a baseball bat. I put fresh strawberries on the cornflakes and taste the sweetness of life. I speak gently to the lady across the table. Marriage is the truest test — to make a good life with your best-informed critic, and thanks to her excellent comedic timing, we have a good life. My third marriage and this year we ding the silver bell of twenty-five years.

America is the land of second and third chances, not like Europe. We have remedial colleges for kids who slept through high school. In Europe, the system is geared toward efficiency: it separates kids by age 12 into Advanced, Mediocre, and Food Service Workers, and once they assign you to a lane, it’s hard to get out of it. In this country, if our children are lazy and undisciplined, we try to see signs of artistic ability. We put them in a fine arts  program. They spend three years writing weird stuff and get an MFA and you drive through McDonald’s and the young people fixing the Egg McMuffins are poets and songwriters.

It’s a land of high hopes, thanks to the Atlantic and Pacific that serve to isolate us from reality. Our ancestors were happy to escape the zeal of revolutionaries and the madness of despots and come to America and work like draft horses, hoping their children and grandchildren would have an easier time of it. And we do. Fifty years ago, when we referred to “homosexuals,” it sounded like people suffering from a condition that required treatment, but when “gay” became common usage, it changed everything. How can you be opposed to happiness?

For an old man, there aren’t many second chances, but we still hope for them. I miss my youth, the buzzin’ of the bees in the cigarette trees near the lemonade springs where the bluebird sings, and now the bee population is down, the smokes are gone, lemonade contains dangerous additives, and when did you last see a bluebird? In my youth, men worked on their cars, changed the oil and the spark plugs, replaced the fan belt, and other men gathered, squatted around the car, and talked about manly things. The driveway was their territory. This is all gone now. Cars can’t be repaired by ordinary people with ordinary tools. Men have been forced into the living room, which belongs to women. They say, “Take your shoes off” and you have to do it.

The country is falling apart. There are new food allergies every week so we can’t have dinner parties anymore unless we limit the menu to locally sourced artisanal lentils. And people who come for dinner spend the first half hour talking about how long it took to get here — rush hour is horrendous, three and four hours, so people email and text behind the wheel, even shave, and do makeup, change a shirt, put on a tie, nobody dares tailgate because they’re steering with their knees so traffic moves even more slowly. Online medical education means someday we’ll go in for a tonsillectomy and come out missing our left lung. The Boeing debacle means we can only ride Airbuses now, planes designed by engineers who eat mussels and wear silk scarves. And Washington — Mr. Trump wouldn’t have been a capable water commissioner in a midsize city but here he is, running foreign policy based on phone conversations with Tucker Carlson. Republican politics is based on the imminence of the Second Coming: if Jesus doesn’t descend within three years and take the Republicans to heaven, they are going to be in very deep waste materials.

But hope remains. People still fall in love. I know millennials who are crazy about each other and don’t try to hide it. The country is on the skids but still I see people going to the trouble of seducing each other. In Minnesota, this is done by owning a snowblower and going to the home of the person you adore and blowing the snow, and if he or she (or they or we or those) is receptive, they will invite you in for a bowl of homemade chili. I don’t know what Californians do but in the north, it’s very simple. Snowblowing followed by chili. Chili with ground beef or chicken in it. What the heck — take the risk. Veganism can wait until after marriage.

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My family and I are at a swimming pool under the palm trees behind a pink stucco 1929 hotel in San Diego, my wife reading a memoir, my daughter swimming laps of alternate crawl and butterfly, and I am trying to think of what one can say about blissfulness other than that, for a Minnesotan brought up on the principle of “It could be worse,” blissfulness comes as a major surprise, like weightlessness. The hotel looks out on the Pacific, a beach where sea lions fraternize and waves crash on the rocks. As I ate my oatmeal on the balcony this morning, a seagull landed on the railing and cocked his eye at the raisins on the cereal so I tossed him one and he caught it. This almost never happens back on the frozen tundra where nature makes serious attempts to kill us. In paradise, it’s Live and Let Live.

My family was evangelical and believed in the imminence of the Rapture when the Lord would appear in the air and we would rise to meet Him and ascend into glory, but we were simple Midwestern people and had no clear idea of glory. It certainly didn’t resemble Anoka, Minnesota. We knew that much.

When I was a kid some relatives moved to California and sent a Christmas card with a picture of an orange tree in their backyard and we didn’t understand how they could bear to live so far from us. They visited us in June, in their pastel outfits, driving cars with enormous tail fins, Lutherans who’d become Universalists and then Theosophists and (who knows?) maybe nudists and meanwhile we endured the cold, the flatness, the oceanlessness, the angry theology, the merciless scrutiny of neighbors, and they sat in San Diego feeling wonderful. I felt contempt for them and looked on snowbirding as weakness of character and the first sign of dementia, but here I sit, under a white canopy, feeling happy.

What I like is that it’s my wife who lobbied for a California winter break and it’s she who chose this perfect hotel. It’s all her doing. She knows it and I know it. I like the feeling of being well cared for. I was the boss of a business for a while and it’s nice to have the big office with the walnut credenza but then you realize that you are the focal point of everyone’s unhappiness, their bouts of depression and boredom and back pain are due to you, Mister Big, and you retire and accept the plaque and then comes this beautiful surprise: your wife loves you and wants you to be blissful.

Blissfulness is a simple matter for a Northerner. You go to a place where you can eat lunch outdoors in January and that does it. The shock of pleasure drives other stuff from your mind — the federal deficit, the Ayatollah’s plans for revenge, the Iowa caucuses, the immolation of eastern Australia — and you sit and write a poem. Not a great poem — those are written by tortured pre-suicidal people — but for one written by a blissful guy, it’s okay.

Oh if you could only see us

Eating fresh tortillas

With salsa and guacamole,

Feeling blissful, even holy,

Here on the patio,

Stunned by the absence of snow,

The sun is out, the patio is crowded.

It is paradise no doubt about it.

Whoever we are, Lutherans, Catholics, Presbyterians,

We are sharing a paradise experience.

Blissful now but eventually hapless:

Thursday I return to Minneapolis.

The sky is bluish blue. A waiter stands ready to bring me a drink, but a glass of wine would be too much, push me right over the edge, I’d start singing “What A Wonderful World,” people would edge away. We’re twenty minutes from Mexico, the carnitas burrito I had for lunch was the best ever and the guacamole too, we’re surrounded by Latino courtliness and affability, my daughter’s butterfly is excellent, my wife loves that I am, thanks to her, so happy.

I sit here, under my canopy, blissing out, and as a true Minnesotan, I suspect that joy goeth before a fall and that a cerebral event is a few hours away, one so extraordinarily unique that it will be named for me, and after my fifty years as a hardworking writer, my name will come to stand for numbness and memory loss. It’s okay. God bless you all. Carry on the work you were put here to do. Some January, sit by a pool in the sunshine but don’t feel you need to write about it, I already did.

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I don’t do New Year’s Eve anymore because the parties never were that much fun and we wound up trapped in corners in the usual intense conversations (kids, schools, political lunacy), and some people drank too much and forced the rest of us into a guardianship role and the sheer awkwardness of telling an old drunk to let his wife drive him home, and so the party ended with us wondering: why do we not know how to have a good time? White liberal guilt? The inbred gloom of northern people? Too many books one has read and is eager to quote? Lack of dancing skills?

The correct answer is No. 4, the inability to dance gracefully with a partner. Jitterbugging and fox-trotting and waltzing were slighted in our curricula in favor of math and science, and how many people can whoop it up with algebraic geometry or number theory? So the party drags and guests wander from room to room with plates of raw vegetables and hummus, glancing at their cellphones, wishing they were elsewhere. No doubt about it, dancing is the key to a good time and the great dance tunes of our youth, like “Brown Sugar” and “Brown-Eyed Girl” when we used to sing, “Sha la la la la la la la la la la te da” led to some fine solo shimmying but that was long ago and we were twistier then. Past the age of 40, you feel self-conscious slipping and sliding alone, whereas when the band strikes up “I Saw Her Standing There” and two jitterbuggers make eye contact and hit the floor for the step-and-hop-and-step-and-hop and quick quick and dip and kick, you’ve got two people having a big time, no gin needed. I’ve seen people polka to “Purple Rain” and look good doing it.

In my high school years, phys-ed class included a few weeks of ballroom dancing but we were too young to appreciate it. The waltz and fox-trot were old dances and we favored the twist. But the twist faded like snow in April while the classics prevailed and there are, you must admit, few things so simply transformative as slipping into the arms of another — your wife, your mother-in-law, the cleaning lady — and moving gracefully in conjunction. It dispels gloom and redeems you from show-offy self-righteous conversation, which is what four-fifths of all conversation is about. Just shut up and be beautiful, swing and sway and smile at your partner, and bow and say, “Thank you.”

The problem, as it so often is, is individualism. If everyone at the party could jitterbug adequately, the party would take off for the moon, but my generation resisted universality, thinking it was regimentation, and opted for uniqueness, which doesn’t exist, as you find out around the age of 40. Being Yourself is a dead end. Every rat who sees the cheese on the little metal flange with the fancy wirework around it thinks he is the first rat ever to come upon such a treasure. It’s a waste of a perfectly good rat.

Someday before I leave the earth, I want to throw a party that people remember with pleasure long afterward. No need for a extended eulogy at the funeral, just stand and say, “Remember his birthday two years ago?” and sing, “You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain, too much love drives a man insane” and everyone jumps up and dances, arms in the air. David danced and leaped before the Lord, willing to look foolish in his praise, and why shouldn’t we? There is a mysterious chemical link between dancing and hopefulness. Jump up and down and swing your arms for a while and you’ll discover it.

I am hopeful about 2020, no need to brood over the past. I’m old and have more regrets than Amazon has fulfillment centers. So what? It’s a New Year, one named for clear vision, and after all the hogwash and chicanery, America is ready to embrace common sense. When the LFW (Leader of the Free World) takes TV shills as top advisors, you know it’s time for new furniture. No need to wear a button on the lapel, but in November, we will vote for someone who doesn’t insult us ten times before breakfast and then we’ll grab each other and dance. Sha la la la la la la la la la lah de dah. You read it here first.

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Coming through airports this week it struck me how kind everyone was, ticket agents, TSA people, cab starters, and then light dawned: it’s Christmas. Charles Dickens had a big impact on the world and so did Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart, not to mention St. Luke. I stood in a long winding line in LaGuardia and sensed no impatience; the TSA guy even smiled and asked how I was. And when I lost my ticket in Atlanta, I walked to Gate T7 and asked an agent and she made me a new one, no problem.

“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” said Blanche DuBois, and when I add to that the kindness of aunts and schoolteachers and the four men, Warren, Barry, Marvin, and Bill, who hired me despite lack of qualifications, then I feel I’ve had a Christmas of a life and if the plane from Atlanta had been struck by a giant meteor, nobody should grieve for me. But we landed and my bag arrived and when I told the security man at Baggage Claim that I’d lost my claim check, he shrugged and waved me through.

And so we Christians needn’t feel sheepish about the shepherds and angels. The day is a lavish gift, even if it comes with some wretched songs, the one about the rum-pum-pum-pum for one and others involving bells jingling that make you want to sue the radio stations. The beauty of the day is its story, however one chooses to read it.

It all happened back in zero A.D.

Two folks in trouble due to pregnancy.

She lay him in the manger

And she wanted to lie down

But shepherds and wise men

Gathered around.

A few slices of bread

Would’ve pleased her

But they only brought spices,

Frankincense and myrrh.

They stood around singing,

These clueless men.

She thought, I’m never gonna do

Another virgin birth again.

Skip the adoring, be astute.

Bring some chocolate and a basket of fruit.

Thirty years ago I was the guest speaker at a Sons of Norway Christmas lutefisk dinner in Minneapolis and so was obliged to eat some, a pale gelatinous slab of former fish that looks like jellified phlegm and tastes like your mouth washed out with Hi-lex, but you eat a slice of rye bread, which acts as a plug to keep it down, and chase it with a shot of aquavit, which kills the taste. I did it because I wanted to make a good impression, but I don’t care what people think anymore, which is the beautiful part of getting old. You have the luxury of editing, dialing everything back, turning down the volume, eliminating the excess. And you discover that less truly is more.

You discover that you can sit in a quiet room and look at a small tree hung with white lights and the Ghost of Christmas Past will bring scene after scene, the wretched lutefisk but also the backyard skating rink and snow descending in the dark, Mother at the piano, the smell of gingerbread coming out of the oven, the games of Rook and Flinch and Pit, the dining table with all the extra leaves in it and Aunt Elsie and Uncle Don and Donnie and Bruce, and Mother slicing the bird even as she quietly disparages her own cooking, and the fabulous gift of a model gas station with crank-operated hoist and gas pumps, so perfect it’s a wonder I didn’t take up auto mechanics as a career.

All I need for Christmas is Christmas Eve in church, holding a candle, singing “Silent Night” a cappella in the dark with the others, walking home through the city, and waking up in the morning with my wife and daughter. Three gifts apiece, one useful, one odd but interesting, one ridiculous. Dinner is nice. We can make it at home or if we go out for a McTurkey sandwich, that’s okay too. Then we get out the board games. A pot of Christmas tea. Nothing more is needed.

Thank you, stranger, for your kindness. Stay warm, keep a candle in the window, be cheered by the visiting spirits, and enjoy your tea. All is calm, all is bright, shepherds quake at the sight.

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I learned a new word last week: “anonymized.” It means just what it says, “made anonymous,” and was used in reference to government reports obtained by the Washington Post that contained truthful revelations about our 18-year war in Afghanistan that the government was lying to the American people about while spending a trillion dollars to achieve something that nobody in the Pentagon could quite define.

My uncles, may they rest in peace, would not have been surprised by the Post’s story. Their regard for generals was low, based on their own military service, and their opinion of politicians lower: they associated high office with adultery, alcohol, and bribery, end of discussion.

My generation, on the other hand, got inspired by movements — civil rights, women’s equality, antiwar, environmental — and various attractive speakers back in the days before the twittering began, and so we became idealists. Back in the day, more than once, I myself stood in vast crowds of people singing, “All we are saying is, Give peace a chance.” The words don’t make sense, but we sang with great feeling.

The revelations about the trillion-dollar war briefly gained the front page and then faded. Our government had knowingly sent men to die in a losing cause and refused to admit it. A few thousand voters in Florida in 2000, aided by the Supreme Court, had changed the course of history. President Gore might’ve paid attention to the melting of Greenland and spent the trillion on solar power, but that is mere history, so the adventures of Mr. T resumed domination of the airwaves. The man, clad in leopard-skin tights, now climbs the high tower of impeachment where, to the astonishment of the crowd, he will dive into the water tank of the Senate and emerge triumphant.

So my generation comes to disillusionment late, whereas the uncles settled into it in their twenties, ignored Washington, worked on their houses, raised kids, went fishing, grew excellent tomatoes, listened to ballgames on the radio. Mr. T is a shock to people my age and the shock doesn’t wear off. When you see him in the driveway with the Washington Monument in the background, you can’t help but compare the two men, and it’s a steep decline.

I felt better Sunday when I attended a memorial service for a friend my age who grew up Jewish in an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, learned to mind his manners, did well in school, went to Brooklyn College for $15 a semester, got into law school on a scholarship. He got a job in a law firm, hated it, took a government job, thought about going to grad school to study philosophy, and to earn his tuition money he drove cab for a while. “The hardest job I ever had,” he told me, but he loved talking to the passengers in the back seat. Everybody had a story and he buzzed around the city and heard some good ones.

That convinced him to go back to lawyering. He worked for the Legal Aid Society, defending the indigent, many of them too dumb to succeed at larceny. He took a job as secretary to a judge who needed serious assistance. This gave him the confidence to run for a civil court judgeship. He won and embarked on a long judicial career, winding up a state judge in the Bronx with an office on 151st Street overlooking Yankee Stadium. True to his Brooklyn upbringing, he never passed through its gates, and true to his education, he faithfully served the people of the Bronx and the laws of the state of New York. He loved his wife, Eleanor, Italian food, jazz and blues and classical music, books of history, and he regarded public service as a high calling.

The Founders envisioned the Senate as a high calling to form a body of individuals of independent mind and conscience and at times it has been and at other times it’s held more than its share of seat-warmers, ward heelers, and errand boys. The advance signals from Mr. McConnell and Mr. Graham say clearly that the fix is in. Honest corruption, in full public view, saves a great deal of time. The water tank will be forty feet deep and the leopard-skin tights will contain a parachute.

So be it. But corruption at the top means the national good depends on dedication in the middle. He was a good man. Fifteen million more like him can save the country.

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I keep unsubscribing from junk mail and it seems that the simple act of unsubscribing opens the sluiceway to even more junk. I get offers to pay cash for my current home, to consolidate my debt, to save up to 50% on things I don’t want, to get a credit card for people with bad credit, a hair implant, introduce me to other lonely people, and so forth.

So I keep clicking and praise God for the Delete key, the invention of which ranks with Gutenberg’s movable type in the annals of human progress, not so much for eliminating junk mail as for eliminating one’s own dim-witted writing. Back in the typewriter age we had erasers and liquid white-out and so-called “Lift-Off Tape” or correctable ribbon, which was okay for fixing a misspelled word, but Delete enables you to remove whole pages of pretentious garbage from your writing such as the passage about the privilege of washing blackboards in Mrs. Moehlenbrock’s fourth-grade classroom at Benson School, which I just deleted here and unless I click on “Undo delete” which I will not do, you need never read it.

The urge to expunge is a powerful thing, admit it. A year ago, my wife and I moved from an enormous house to a 2 BR apartment and disposed of a dumpsterful of memorabilia, most of which we’d forgotten we had, and truckloads of comfy furniture that went to a charity that sets up young folks for housekeeping. I expected it to be painful; it was exhilarating — throwing out all of my college term papers so at last I can forget that young man.

At this moment, one-third of America wishes it could cleanse the nation of another one-third. One of the thirds possesses most of the guns and I am in the unarmed third that wants to change “manhole” to “maintenance aperture” and Indiana to Western Ohio and pays extra for non-GMO bottled water. It’s the gunners vs. the correctionists.

There is another third, sometimes called “moderates,” and I wrote a paragraph about them here but I’m deleting it now because it is bound to offend everybody.

The third I belong to wants America to be Scandinavia. I lived in Copenhagen for a couple years and doubt that Americans will take to herring as a main dish or become a nation where even conservatives are liberal and everyone rides a bicycle and wears a poncho in a bright primary color. Our bike lanes in America are primarily for young men delivering pad thai to your home. Nobody I know uses them.

The gunners own the middle of the country and the correctionists live in reservations on either coast and the middlings keep their heads down and observe radio silence.

We live in bubbles, and for me, the remarkable thing about the House Judiciary Committee hearing last week was the chance to hear an articulate and well-reasoned argument that disagreed with my own point of view. A person should have this experience more often.

Four law professors sat at the witness table and one of them, Jonathan Turley, argued against impeachment, that the process is moving with undue haste and has not established a solid foundation for such a radical act. I listened to him in wonder. The Republicans who should’ve been making the argument have wandered off into berserk corners and Professor Turley did their work for them as the other professors sat nearby and listened, no sneering, no insults. (For credibility’s sake, he had to aver that he hadn’t voted for Trump and didn’t agree with him.) But his testimony was so dramatic, it inspired death threats against him and his family. This is what we’ve come to in America. Respectful disagreement is in short supply and aggressive stupidity is running wild.

Well-reasoned disagreement is one of the chief benefits of a good marriage. I married, as you did, for affection and humor and to have someone to be naked with, but in addition I got a debate partner who knows more about the real world, having lived in New York — a violinist so she knows how to focus, has experienced poverty, has excellent social skills, and is deeply moved by Beethoven and Mahler and Puccini. Once I got mixed up with her, I was done with marital tragedy, Ibsen, O’Neill, all that, and part of a comedy dance team. I could say more but I would probably need to delete it.

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Probably the greenhouse gas report of the U.N. Environment Program shouldn’t have come out the week of Thanksgiving, a time when gassy emissions are quite heavy in the U.S. and people are likely to use the newspaper for guests to park their snowy boots on, but there it was and the picture is bleak, perhaps dire. The planet is heating up at a rate faster than scientists had ever expected, the U.S. is turning our back on the issue, and most people are dozing comfortably through it all. The press leaps when the White House tweets but it doesn’t know how to cover the major crisis of our time, the slow demise of Earth itself.

Other species have undergone extinction and the only reason to think we may be exempt is the divine promise of eternal life offered to the faithful in most major religions. St. Peter tells us that God is not willing that any shall perish. But a moment later he says, “But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.” The very sort of thing the U.N. report was getting at.

In my experience, the Christian church comes down heavily on the side of hope and joy, Advent being its busy season, and it leaves the apocalyptic stuff to fringe groups. Norman Rockwell did not paint pictures of Main Street going up in flames, nor do you see a New Yorker cover of the earth passing away: we are a hopeful and humorous people by and large.

I grew up in a fringe evangelical group and when a good evangelist was in top form, a boy could smell the fervent heat and imagine hot lava bubbling in the Lake of Fire, a phenomenal experience very far from Walt Disney and Mister Rogers. It made me feel odd as a young person, longing to be normal, listening to Don and Phil Everly who dreamed about holding someone with all her charms in their arms and then woke up with little Susie and were in trouble deep, but the Ultimate Fate of Mankind was not their concern. I was devoted to their music and the vividness of longing was stronger than the abstraction of the ultimate.

And so it is today. The immediate environment engages us completely and the future is easily ignored. I am 77 and the thought of death seldom occurs to me, talk about obliviousness. And on Sunday, when we were visited by a pal with her beautiful baby, the child was the center of the universe. She is eleven months old and is taking steps, holding on to a chair and then launching out across the floor to her mother, her comforter, her dairy bar and wiper and valet. The child is thrilled by this short journey though she teeters slightly and must stop to correct herself. Walking at eleven months marks her as definitely above average and when she arrives at her mother’s pant leg, the child looks up at me intently to make sure I noticed.

In church that morning, we were told, “Wake up. Lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.” That was St. Paul’s message to the Romans and now to the Americans. In other words, “Stop lying to yourself. Get smart.” This child will inherit our mistakes and what will her life be like if, twenty years from now, it’s too late to correct them?

The car is stuck in deep snow and we are far from town and there is no cellphone service. We can curse our predicament but it will not levitate us back on the road. The answer is to start shoveling and hope for someone to come by who has a tow chain and a good heart. Meanwhile, our government has been devoted to works of darkness and it must be thrown out next fall, the whole gang of crooks and con men. This is as clear as day. I’ve spent enough time in New York City to be realistic about Democratic politicians, but there’s a difference between confusion and corruption. I look at this child bravely journeying across the kitchen floor toward her beloved and I pray that someone will come along to Make America Intelligent Again.

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Friday was a dark day though we didn’t talk about it because we had dinner with two young newlyweds and a friend who recently lost her husband, so we kept it light, nonetheless I could see the motorcade coming around the corner, the motorcycle cops, the woman in the pink suit, but there was no need to go there.

It was a happy dinner party. The young wife is French and we got talking about American colloquialisms and she was fascinated by “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” and “easy as pie” for which she offered “mettre les doigts dans le nez,” (sticking fingers up the nose), meaning: no big deal, nothing to brag about. Or “pisser dans un violon” (urinating in a violin), which means something similar. She was quite struck by “up fecal creek without a paddle” and “defecate or get off the pot.” And she was rather taken aback by “brown nose.”

Our friend Ellie is fluent in French and her husband, Ira, who died, was a retired judge who had married the young couple in our apartment so the French woman could get her green card. It was his last official act so they are sort of a memorial to him. I had had dinner with him and Ellie two days before he died. He was in poor health but good spirits and he managed to grill the steaks under the broiler and enjoy a glass of wine and keep up his end of the conversation. He was a joyful man and was very much with us Friday night and we didn’t need to talk about him. We just tossed idioms back and forth.

The young French woman understood “icing on the cake” (though the French would put a cherry on it) and “you can’t tell a book by its cover — the French would say “L’habit ne fait pas le moine” (the cassock does not make a monk) — but she was puzzled by “the birds and the bees” and “wash your mouth out with soap” and then her American husband said that his grandma had actually done it. “No!” we cried. “Yes!” he said. “I was smarting off and she told me to stick out my tongue and she scrubbed it with soap.”

It was a lively cultural exchange and so much fun, we served two desserts, some light French pastries and then apple pie, which nothing is more American than.

I didn’t mention 1963 though the day is clear in my mind. I was 21, walking across the University of Minnesota campus, and a man ran by saying something weird about the president, and I went in the back door of Eddy Hall where KUOM had an AP teletype and there it was, clattering away, typing bulletins in incomplete sentences. He was dead in Dallas.

It was a visceral tragedy, a graceful young leader and war hero picked off by a sniper in public view, and it hit everyone hard, a kick in the solar plexus. In the years since, despite a truckload of books about him and November 22, the day makes no sense. It’s a boulder that fell out of the sky. Like 9/11. Two days after that boulder fell, Ellie and Ira and I went down to Greenwich Village for supper. The air was full of dust from the towers and trucks roared past carrying debris, and we never spoke of the catastrophe or death, we talked about travel and children, everything other than the catastrophe downtown. All around us we saw New Yorkers doing the same thing. An act of resistance, to go about your business as if the obscene violence had not occurred.

The beauty of Friday night was the presence of the young that closes the door to the vast ghostly galleries of the past, particularly the parts that make no sense. They are water under the bridge. Brooding accomplishes nothing: you may as well stick your finger up your nose. So we talked about Thanksgiving. The young French wife is looking forward to her husband making turkey and dressing and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie. They’re happy as two peas in a pod. Long ago, we got kicked in the stomach. Why bring it up now and rain on their parade and be a wet blanket? That’s putting the cart before the horse. So I didn’t. But you are remembered, President Kennedy. Still waters run deep.

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