Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 66

There was a cranky grandma in front of the supermarket on Friday, yelling at a baby in a stroller, “Don’t ask for another muffin when you have one in your hand! Eat that one before you ask for more!” and telling a little boy beside her, “Stop walking back and forth like that. Stand still, for God’s sake. And stop your whining.” The poor kid was a little restless and Grandma was at the end of her rope. He started to cry. “Shut up,” she said.

There is a limit to everything, even grandma love. Grandma has just so much saintliness in the tank and then she becomes an ordinary mortal, and I empathize, ma’am. My grandma Dora was so perfect in her black shirtwaist with white dots, her knitting, her scent of lavender, her gentle profanity (“Oh fudge” and “Oh drat”), that my girl cousins find it hard to rise to her standard. Grandma had been a railroad telegrapher and a country schoolteacher, had endured farm life during the Dirty Thirties, could slaughter a goose by wringing its neck, and was a woman of consummate dignity. She never had to say, “Shut up,” she only had to look at you. She had thirty grandkids and every year you got a card from her with a dollar in it.

We worshipped her and so she never needed to yell at us, but the cranky grandma’s line, “Don’t ask for more when you have one in your hand,” struck me as something grandma Dora probably said to me when I was small. It reverberated, like a wooden spoon against a dishpan. I was a greedy child and it has carried on into my old age and I am trying to deal with it.

I grew up out in the sticks, hoeing corn and cutting thistles, and wore hand-me-down clothes and was ambitious to be Somebody and that’s why I became a writer. I wrote bad poetry for a while and then books of fiction and earned enough as an Arthur to buy a big house with 14-foot ceilings and elaborate plaster moldings, the sort of rooms men in top hats might’ve signed treaties in, and I greedily filled them with books, collector’s editions, first editions, handsome hardbound classics, hundreds of them, Plato and Melville and Dickens and Milton and Aristophanes, which I never read but enjoyed as a sign of distinguishment. I had handfuls of books and wanted more. Then I fell in love with a sensible woman and now I’m on the path to recovery.

She was a freelance classical violinist and so she had experienced scarcity firsthand. She never sought parental subsidy, never got a day job, so she learned to live on ramen noodles when necessary, sharing an apartment with roommates and their dogs, using the refrigerator as a closet. She believes in the one-muffin-one-hand principle. We now live happily in an apartment and my collection of handsome books was donated to my high school library. There’s a park nearby, a church, a coffee shop, a grocery, and the ballpark is a fifteen-minute walk. We have what we need.

What cured my greed for excellence was a Distinguished Alumnus award from my alma mater, which put an immense portrait of me on a wall. I had not been a good student at all; I almost flunked out. It was embarrassing, like being named Catholic Mother of the Year though you’re actually a stepmother and polytheistic and your stepkids aren’t speaking to you. I had yearned for recognition, a Pullet Surprise or maybe Poet Laundromat, but the Extinguished Alumnus cured me of striving for excellence. And I’ve been much happier ever since.

I have friends who are hung up on excellence, who patronize only the best restaurants and know which coffee beans are best and exactly how long to grind them, but I am happy in the slow lane, which I was doing when I heard the cranky grandma urge limits on what we consume. A first step toward dealing with the garbage we’ve left for our grandkids: be happy with what you have, it’s good enough. Tomorrow, try getting along with less. I skipped breakfast today and feel just fine. I’ll walk to the ballpark tonight for the game and will buy one bratwurst with kraut and mustard. I could polish off two but one is enough. Baseball is about spirit and getting a jump on the ball. Don’t stuff yourself.

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The beauty of Brexit for an American is that it gives us a glance at the debate in the House of Commons, an actual spirited debate, something unknown in our Congress, Conservative and Labor facing each other, two sword lengths apart, speaking in bursts of argument and rebuttal, no lengthy droning allowed, members free to jeer and laugh, the Honorable Speaker of the House John Bercow crying out, “Order!” which to an American sounds like he is referring to ordure or ordering hors d’oeuvres.

Nancy Pelosi never shouts “Order” in our House because hardly anyone is present. They’re all in their offices, on the phone, raising money. As for the Senate, it is a hospice. And this is why journalists focus on White House twittering. If the Chief Twit tweets, “Boogers on you, dum-dum. Talk to the hand,” it will be front-page for at least half an hour, and we’ll learn that no president in history ever used the “boogers on you” insult. How interesting. This is the current state of our democracy.

No wonder then that our government is unable to do a simple obvious sensible thing such as restore the ban on assault weapons. Men routinely give up their right to carry an AR-15 when they go through security at the airport. The Second Amendment ends at the metal detector. Air travel is crucial to the economy, and the American people won’t fly on a plane with NRA members wearing bandoliers, holding rifles with enormous magazines, carrying Glocks and Berettas. It’s not the result of a Supreme Court decision: it’s called “common sense.”

The majority of Americans would, if they were to see a civilian cross a parking lot with a semi-automatic weapon, think “lunatic” and make a mental note to avoid that shopping center in the future. These weapons are instruments of terror, their only purpose is to fulfill the violent fantasies of weird men. So why are they legal? The regular occurrence of mass shootings in public places is doing an enormous favor for Amazon and other mail-order houses. Thus, Walmart took a small sensible step last week and stopped selling ammunition for assault rifles so that killers who come blasting into the store and run out of ammo can’t restock on the spot, they have to go to Costco.

Public service is a high calling and, for that, you need only look at the stories about law enforcement people who’ve rushed to shooting scenes, run into buildings past scenes of panic, and approached the maniac who was shooting, and, as they say, “neutralized” him. The bravery involved is astonishing. It goes against our normal instinct to seek cover and avoid harm. Instead, the cops go in. Why can’t the empty suits in the Senate find sufficient testosterone to make it hard to own a weapon of mass carnage? It defies analysis.

The NRA has five million members. The Mormon church has six and a half million. If it pays enough money, will the Republicans bring back polygamy? If the Emotional Support Animal Association ponies up the cash, will Congress vote to allow llamas in restaurants? If the American Sunbathing Association fights for nudity as a basic First Amendment right and plunks down $30 million to the RNC, will POTUS come out on the White House drive and appear before the cameras wearing his Make American Naked Again cap? Do you think this POTUS is incapable of such a thing? Really?

It was a popular referendum that got Britain into the Brexit mess and, despite the chaos, they believe that democracy can get them out. It is up to Democrats to restore such faith in this country. The party is in a marathon slog, gradually forcing candidates out who are running on fumes and illusion. The primaries lie ahead. The future of government rests with a couple hundred thousand voters who ticked Republican in 2016 and now, in the privacy of the booth, will admit to the disaster that has ensued and rectify the mistake. It is as obvious as the hair on his head.

(BOOING, JEERING)

SPEAKER: Hors d’oeuvres! Hors d’oeuvres!

Thank you, Mister Speaker. Let us look at the bright side. At least the Senators are not handing out free assault rifles and requiring us all to exercise our rights and carry one. This is a step in the right direction. And I would like deep-fried calamari and hummus with sticks of celery. Thank you very much.

The post Hors d’oeuvres! Hors d’oeuvres in the House! appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

The beauty of Brexit for an American is that it gives us a glance at the debate in the House of Commons, an actual spirited debate, something unknown in our Congress, Conservative and Labor facing each other, two sword lengths apart, speaking in bursts of argument and rebuttal, no lengthy droning allowed, members free to jeer and laugh, the Honorable Speaker of the House John Bercow crying out, “Order!” which to an American sounds like he is referring to ordure or ordering hors d’oeuvres.

Nancy Pelosi never shouts “Order” in our House because hardly anyone is present. They’re all in their offices, on the phone, raising money. As for the Senate, it is a hospice. And this is why journalists focus on White House twittering. If the Chief Twit tweets, “Boogers on you, dum-dum. Talk to the hand,” it will be front-page for at least half an hour, and we’ll learn that no president in history ever used the “boogers on you” insult. How interesting. This is the current state of our democracy.

No wonder then that our government is unable to do a simple obvious sensible thing such as restore the ban on assault weapons. Men routinely give up their right to carry an AR-15 when they go through security at the airport. The Second Amendment ends at the metal detector. Air travel is crucial to the economy, and the American people won’t fly on a plane with NRA members wearing bandoliers, holding rifles with enormous magazines, carrying Glocks and Berettas. It’s not the result of a Supreme Court decision: it’s called “common sense.”

The majority of Americans would, if they were to see a civilian cross a parking lot with a semi-automatic weapon, think “lunatic” and make a mental note to avoid that shopping center in the future. These weapons are instruments of terror, their only purpose is to fulfill the violent fantasies of weird men. So why are they legal? The regular occurrence of mass shootings in public places is doing an enormous favor for Amazon and other mail-order houses. Thus, Walmart took a small sensible step last week and stopped selling ammunition for assault rifles so that killers who come blasting into the store and run out of ammo can’t restock on the spot, they have to go to Costco.

Public service is a high calling and, for that, you need only look at the stories about law enforcement people who’ve rushed to shooting scenes, run into buildings past scenes of panic, and approached the maniac who was shooting, and, as they say, “neutralized” him. The bravery involved is astonishing. It goes against our normal instinct to seek cover and avoid harm. Instead, the cops go in. Why can’t the empty suits in the Senate find sufficient testosterone to make it hard to own a weapon of mass carnage? It defies analysis.

The NRA has five million members. The Mormon church has six and a half million. If it pays enough money, will the Republicans bring back polygamy? If the Emotional Support Animal Association ponies up the cash, will Congress vote to allow llamas in restaurants? If the American Sunbathing Association fights for nudity as a basic First Amendment right and plunks down $30 million to the RNC, will POTUS come out on the White House drive and appear before the cameras wearing his Make American Naked Again cap? Do you think this POTUS is incapable of such a thing? Really?

It was a popular referendum that got Britain into the Brexit mess and, despite the chaos, they believe that democracy can get them out. It is up to Democrats to restore such faith in this country. The party is in a marathon slog, gradually forcing candidates out who are running on fumes and illusion. The primaries lie ahead. The future of government rests with a couple hundred thousand voters who ticked Republican in 2016 and now, in the privacy of the booth, will admit to the disaster that has ensued and rectify the mistake. It is as obvious as the hair on his head.

(BOOING, JEERING)

SPEAKER: Hors d’oeuvres! Hors d’oeuvres!

Thank you, Mister Speaker. Let us look at the bright side. At least the Senators are not handing out free assault rifles and requiring us all to exercise our rights and carry one. This is a step in the right direction. And I would like deep-fried calamari and hummus with sticks of celery. Thank you very much.

The post Hors d’oeuvres! Hors d’oeuvres in the house! appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Each life is a work of art but these days I live a very small life, more an etching than a mural. My friends are thinking large thoughts about the EU and Hong Kong and the future of American democracy, and I am thinking about these organic blueberries I bought to put on my cereal — why am I putting them in a colander to wash them? They’re from Bayfield, Wisconsin. Why wash Bayfield off them with Minneapolis tap water? Once you start worrying about the cleanliness of Wisconsin blueberries, you’re on the way to distrusting the Pure Food and Drug Act and believing that liberals in the FDA are spraying blueberries with scopolamine to undermine free will, and soon you have purchased an assault rifle for when chaos sweeps the land, and your neighbors look uneasy when you step outside. So I don’t wash the blueberries. My big decision of the morning.

I never shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, but Johnny Cash did and that’s what I call living large. Bob Marley shot the sheriff. Bob Dylan shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy. She inherited a million bucks and when she died it came to him. “I can’t help it if I’m lucky,” he said. I shot baskets in the driveway when I was a kid but then I got a driver’s license and started living large and now I sit and shoot the breeze. Like what I’m doing now.

I live in a bubble as most people do, which makes for a small life. I went to the Minnesota State Fair twice this year, an occasion where I rub shoulders with Otherness, the anti-vaxxers, the NRA crowd, the deep state conspiracy believers, the wall-builders, and here I am, a socialist and reader of Fake News who wants to take guns away from law-abiding people, and we’re all eating corn dogs and deep-fried cheese curds together, and being Minnesotans, we’re too polite to talk politics, and then we go back to our fellow bubbleheads and curse the other team.

To be brutally honest, it’s a little boring in my liberal bubble and when the conversation turns to the relative virtues of wines, I feel obliged to cause trouble. I say, “I never knew an Indian who cared for wine.” My failure to use the term “Native American” makes people set their wineglass down and look at the floor. Most of the Native Americans I’ve known used the word “Indian,” misnomer though it is: they don’t consider themselves generic, they belong to a specific band but they don’t expect you to know that. I don’t care to be called “Anglo-American” — I’d rather be called “Honey” — and though the intention of “Native American” is good, the word “Native” to me suggests teepees and stone tools. This leads to serious throat-clearing around the table.

I can cause trouble by saying that newspapers are dying because the writing is dull. I’m prepared to argue that the State Fair is too much about deep-fried food and not enough about entertainment. I will argue for Elizabeth Warren, knowing the table is mostly pro-Biden. I defend fall and winter against summer. Other people talk lovingly about the small independent bookstore, I am glad to say a good word for Amazon.

In my cranky uncle role, I’m libertarian. It’s a big country, there’s room for us all. If you believe the earth is flat, go live in North Dakota and be happy. If you want to keep an arsenal of weapons, buy eighty acres of woods and build a cabin and fire when ready.

Let’s have some conversation. Let’s not sit discussing the relative virginity of our olive oils. The Brits will have to figure out Brexit. Hong Kong is between the mob in the streets and the commissariat and I’m with the mob for all the good it does them. As for democracy, we have a president who reflects this country better than we communists realize. Crude, ignorant chauvinists have done fairly well in this country for generations.

I had a couple cranky uncles who did their job well and now they’re gone and if I don’t take their place, who will? Want me to defend the devil himself? Glad to do it. For a fallen angel, he’s given God a run for his money and when he lands in the fiery inferno, he will not lack for company.

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Here in Minneapolis we are dealing with the issue of slavery, long after everyone thought the Civil War answered the question. The city is changing the name of one of our beautiful lakes from Calhoun to Bde Maka Ska, on the grounds that John C. Calhoun of South Carolina was a wretched man and owned slaves. Bde Maka Ska is the name the Dakotah called it until 1817 when Secretary of War Calhoun sent Army surveyors to look over the territory and, voilà, they named it for their boss.

It’s a lovely name, Bde Maka Ska, and over time, as old people die off and young people grow up, it will come into common usage, but these things take time. The Triborough Bridge in New York was renamed the RFK bridge ten years ago but nobody calls it that. To Minneapolitans, Calhoun is a lake, not a man, and if you asked us about John C., we’d have to Google him.

I made the mistake the other day of saying this to the wrong people — that the name change, while harmless, does very little for tribal descendants suffering in the epidemic of opioid addiction, many of whom are homeless and camping in the city. It’s a faint gesture, like if your roof blew off and you sat down and wrote a poem about it. Why not take on the French missionary Louis Hennepin who came in 1680 and lorded it over the natives and barged in and named the Falls of St. Anthony on the Mississippi. What right did he have to do that? Minneapolis is in Hennepin County; if you deHennepinize us and put us in Gakaamikijiwan County, you’ve accomplished something.

In the room at the time was an elderly Lutheran who got all red in the face and told me I was looking at this from a position of white privilege and if I were Native American or a person of color, I’d be able to see this but I can’t because I’m a white guy. He was quite incensed. He was white himself but he was now speaking for the others.

This is why I despair of my fellow Democrats as we approach an election year, that we’ll find a righteous nominee who says the correct things about Calhoun-type issues and who will carry five states, and in 2021, as Ginsburg and Breyer retire from the Supreme Court and the country enters a permanent state of E Pluribus Duo, and the twittering gets crazier and crazier, and mass shootings become page 7 news, and Two Corinthians becomes required reading in schools — when that happens, Iceland is going to look better and better.

The language is not terribly hard. “A man walked into a bar with a handful of dog droppings” in Icelandic is “Maður gekk inn á bar með handfylli af hundaskítum,” according to Google Translate, and Reykjavík is a beautiful and civilized city, as I recall, and I wouldn‘t be a citizen so the renaming of glaciers to remove the influence of jerks (skíthaell) wouldn’t matter to me.

As an alien in Iceland, I will have to get used to a herring diet, fried herring and herring coffee and herring ice cream, and I probably will need to resume the consumption of alcohol, which is helpful in the pronunciation of Icelandic. Google shows me only one Anglican church in Reykjavík but the Mass is in Icelandic, only the sermon in English, and that’s the part I don’t want to listen to, so I’ll have to become Lutheran. It will be easy to get off the internet since I won’t understand the directions anyway, and so the New York Times and the Washington Post will be unavailable to me and that will be an enormous relief. I don’t want to read about the willful dismemberment of the Union, anymore than I care to read vampire fiction or listen to Christian pop-rock. As America enters dementia, I want my mind to stay clear.

If five hundred of us band together and form a colony, it’ll be much cozier. English will be our language, but I don’t want an English name lest we be marked as imperialists. I’m happy to name it Bde Maka Ska. Let the Icelanders know, we come in peace and are unarmed. All we ask is the right to play baseball, enjoy non-herring hot dogs, and make fun of the self-righteous wherever we find them.

The post Looking forward to my Reykjavík years appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

A few more days and then summer is over and done, and good riddance, we can put away the humorous T-shirts and resume intelligent life on earth. I felt a hint of September in the air last Wednesday and it made me happy, like walking up the street and hearing the neighbor girl playing a Chopin étude instead of that dang Bach minuet. Finally, we’re getting somewhere.

Summer is nice for about a month and then it raises hopes of euphoria that cannot be met and it’s time to return to reality. Euphoria is available in pharmaceutical form but it’s nothing to base a life on. It tends to lead to stupidity.

I’m an old man, I didn’t just fall off the rutabaga wagon, so you have to listen to me. I look back on a lifetime of wretched vacation trips — the misery of canoeing the Boundary Waters wilderness in a cloud of mosquitoes — the week in Maine, listening to rain on the roof. And then there was Australia, twenty-five hours from Minnesota: either you fly first-class for the price of a three-bedroom home, or you fly steerage like a criminal in leg irons, and spend two weeks dreading the return. And there was Barbados, where a white man who lay on the beach for ten minutes opened the door to a world of pain and spent a week trying to keep any material object from touching his skin.

The lesson here is simple: don’t vacate. It tends to make you feel vacant. Stay home and read a good book. If you need to travel, get a hotel room in Duluth and take the book with you. There’s a lake there that’s superior to any you’ve seen. It’s good enough.

The problem with summer is that you feel you’re missing something that they have in Paris or Aspen or New Zealand or Walden Pond, but in fact it’s right there in your own home, and the beauty of winter is that it’s all about getting home and staying there as the blizzard approaches and dire warnings are broadcast and when you arrive home after your heroic escape from the jaws of the storm, your children who’ve treated you with faint contempt for months throw their arms around you weeping in gratitude, orphanhood avoided. It’s the truth.

A good snowstorm gives us perspective. It makes us cheerful. Eight inches of snow, high winds, the mercury falling into nothingness, it’s an event that pulls people together. Everyone has a story about where they were when the storm hit and how they made it home, a story like Proust except funnier.

You don’t come home from Paris with a story. You come home with the knowledge that you’re not French. Winter is more interactive. The sidewalk is treacherous and that is a reality; you must walk slowly, flat-footed, or you may slip in an odd twisty way and wind up in rehab for six months with a unique injury that goes into orthopedic textbooks and is named for you.

And as you slip and feel yourself falling, you realize that even though you are a great author or a leading authority or a beloved teacher, the laws of physics apply to you just as they did to Saddam Hussein when the hangman kicked the trap. You are not in control here. And then you fall and you land in a snowbank. Snow is soft. God is merciful.

This sensation of being Out of Control lasts the evening as you come home to your weeping family. They bring you hot chocolate or a hot brandy, your choice. You tell about your drive home, the satisfaction of seeing CEOs in their limos in the ditch, waiting for a tow truck. The wind howls in the chimney, you put a log on the fire, the dog lies against your feet, children nestle against you, a quilt over your lap, and your spouse winks at you in a meaningful way. This is what it’s all about. The dog is optional, the fire can be a video image, but you need the cold to inspire the nestling and the wink.

Romance requires some snow.

I’d say fourteen inches or so.

People aren’t ready

For love when they’re sweaty

Like they are when it’s twenty below.

It’s like the old man of Nantucket

Who slipped on the walk. Such bad luck, it

Was not his intention

But still — did I mention

His sweetheart was happy to see him.

The post Soon September, and then sanity returns appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Moral choices face us every day. Standing in Whole Foods at the array of olive oils, I pass over the French and Italian for political reasons and choose the Portuguese because I met olive growers in Portugal last summer, village people, and liked them, and I assume California olives come from groves owned by Silicon Valley tycoons as a tax write-off and may contain silicon and the Spanish may come from old Franco sympathizers, and then I choose a raw, unfiltered, organic kosher vinegar — how can you argue with organic kosher? — and then on to the butter. I buy the local small-town creamery butter over the major corporate: I seem to recall a hefty political donation by Big Butter in exchange for relaxed regulation. And this is why shopping takes me longer than it otherwise might. Righteousness.

I’m obligated to do the right thing, having entered my 78th year. I am kind to strangers, I hold the door open for people except young women who might be offended, I subscribe to newspapers, I even read the editorials. Longevity is not a right; a man is pro¬grammed to degener¬ate. Viagra doesn’t occur in nature. Nature only wanted me to have offspring, raise them to be able to fend for themselves, and get out of the way. God instilled hormones in young people to make them treat us like garbage and thus encourage us to get out of their way. But we still have things to say.

This is why the Rolling Stones are out touring in their old age. Rock stars used to feel obligated to die young, OD, go down in a plane, and become immortal, but immortality is no substitute for life itself, and this is the Stones’ message to their fellow septuagenarians: don’t give up — if you’ve still got it, use it. They’re still playing “Brown Sugar” and “Tumbling Dice” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” better than any bar band around, so why stop? Mr. Jagger came back from aortic repair to be 17 again. Mr. Dylan, at 78, goes on singing songs, many of which (“I aimed my hand at the mongrel dogs who teach, fearing not I’d become my enemy in the instant that I preach, my existence led by confusion boats, mutiny from stern to bow”) sound like a teenager wrote them. Brian Wilson is still in love with surfing and beaches and California girls.

I was 16 that February morning when we heard on the car radio that Buddy Holly had died in a plane crash in an Iowa cornfield, our hero in his black horn-rims singing “Not Fade Away,” and the kid driving the car pounded the steering wheel and said, “This is so stupid. How can this happen?” Stupidity, that’s how. The pilot was unqualified for night flight and was too stunned by celebrity to admit it so he took off and flew the plane into the ground.

Stupidity keeps winning. Look at Washington. What is stupider than old politicians who deny global warming and so their policies are gauged to serve the elderly who won’t live to see the consequences? Look at the jerk who walked into the Walmart in Springfield, Mo., wearing an armored vest and carrying a loaded assault rifle, to make sure nobody would interfere with his Second Amendment rights. He told the cops who arrested him that he figured that in New York or California this might cause people to freak out but not in Missouri. How did this insanity come to dominate the Supreme Court of the United States?

What is to be done, people?

I remember a concert in an outdoor amphitheater in Atlanta where a hundred drunks in the corporate seats down front clanked their wine bottles and chortled and heckled through “Sempre libera” from Verdi’s La Traviata until you wanted to put garbage bags over their heads, but the valiant soprano onstage simply lifted her chin and sang beyond the drunken vice presidents of marketing to the 6,000 people sitting out in the dark, her true audience. She trusted the acoustics of the place, that her beautiful voice would carry up into the dark and that the privileged peabrains in the $100 seats would be like distant traffic. There is a principle here: don’t mind the jerks, just be as good as you can be for the people who know the difference and care. Illegitimi non carborundum. Ignore them all.

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My birthday is this week, which I mention by way of saying, “Please. No gifts.” My love and I went through major downsizing in January and we are pretty much done with Things now, even a picture of a wilderness lake taken by you or an inspirational book that could change our lives. My life is good enough. Every day is precious. When you reach 77, you’ll feel the same way. It’s a shame that a con man is in the White House as the Arctic is melting and white nationalists are shooting up our cities, but we’ll be okay, we just need a Trexit vote next year.

I reached my present age thanks to medical advances that didn’t exist for my uncles (than whom I am now somewhat older) nor for Dostoevsky (59) or Thoreau (44). Pharmaceuticals would’ve enabled Dostoevsky to retire from writing agonizing novels and switch over to light comedy in his old age and Thoreau to leave Concord and move to New York and find a girlfriend. He went out on a cold rainy night to look at trees and caught bronchitis, which agitated his TB and he went into a steep decline. As he lay dying, his aunt asked if he’d made his peace with God, and Henry said, “I was not aware that we had ever quarreled.” So he had a good last line, which many people don’t, but think what he and his girlfriend could’ve done with thirty more years. Go into the canoe business, buy a house with a lawn, beget kiddoes, enjoy evenings at home, Isabelle lying with her head in Henry’s lap, reading “Walden,” laughing at the funny parts.

Life is unbearably precious. Two heroes of mine died in car crashes when I was in college, and yet I myself, a couple years later, driving north on Highway 47 in my 1956 Ford, on a straight stretch in Isanti County, gunned it to 100 mph just to see what it felt like. It felt good. Then a pickup truck eased out of a driveway and onto the road. This was before seat belts. In a split second, I swerved to go behind him and it was a good choice — he didn’t back up — otherwise he and I would’ve been forever joined in a headline. I hope he has enjoyed his survival. Whenever I relive those fifteen seconds, all regrets vanish, all complaints evaporate.

I am now older than my older brother, who died ten years ago at 71. He slipped while skating and fell backward and hit his head. I think of him often. He was a scientist and engineer, a problem-solver, a sailor, a family man, and when faced with a personal dilemma, it’s good to ask, “What would Philip have said?” He tends to recommend patience, attention to detail, and taking a break for a few hours, perhaps on a boat, during which the answer may suddenly occur to you.

I don’t brood about death as the actual date approaches. My mother (97) enjoyed herself into her mid-nineties, flew places, saw her ancestral Scotland, cruised the coast of Alaska, and seemed, all in all, happier than when she had six little kids to worry about. We grew up near the Mississippi and she thought extensively about drowning. When cousin Roger (17) drowned, trying to impress his girlfriend Susan, Mother sent me to swimming lessons at the Y, but I couldn’t bear it, the instructor was such a bully, so I went to the library instead, a wise choice on my part, and I grew up to earn my way as a writer rather than as a professional swimmer.

Nature is not interested in my twilight years; past 30, semen develops problems, man becomes irrelevant in the furtherance of the species. God created erectile dysfunction because old men can’t be trusted to raise kids. Living past 70 is an artificial idea, a lovely idea, like flying or anesthesia, but still. So an old man needs to justify his continuance, taking up space and being a traffic hazard on the freeway by driving the speed limit. My reason for living is simply this: I am still working and my best work may be yet ahead of me.

I say, 77 is a fine age, way beyond 17 or 37 or 57, but take your time getting there, and remember to marry someone who is good company and can carry one end of the conversation and sometimes both. There’s the real message. That’s worth reading to the end of the column to find out.

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I sat up high over third base watching my pitcher get pounded by the New York Yankees a few nights ago, looking out on what used to be the printing and warehouse district of Minneapolis, which is now the condo/espresso/IT district. Where ink-stained gents used to trundle giant rolls of paper into the big presses, now you find highly caffeinated people staring at screens and conceptualizing. I know few people who work with their hands, just their fingers.

I know a few gardeners but the leash laws now keep dogs indoors so the city is overrun with raccoons and rabbits who scarf up the tomatoes and corn and peas. Men I know don’t work on their cars anymore: too complicated, like everything else. The lack of physical labor has led to a boom in personal trainers, an occupation nonexistent back in the day. My dad got his exercise hoeing and hammering nails into two-by-fours to frame up a wall. The women did squats and stretches, vacuuming and scrubbing and checking on pies in the oven.

That was the Depression generation. My generation, the Seekers of Self-Knowledge, aspired to be intellectuals and we produced teachers, managers, office workers, engineers (the ones at drafting tables, not locomotives). We hire handymen and buy pies at the bakery.

The chance to think large thoughts: this is the beauty of an inning in which New Yorkers are making us Minnesotans feel like ignorant farmers — but hold on — Bad Metaphor. Farmers know about soil, animal husbandry, machines, weather, carpentry, gardening, and more, whereas New Yorkers need to live in an apartment building with an on-site super — in other words, Assisted Living.

Last week, I managed to lift the lid off the toilet tank and reattach the little chain to the arm that when you push on the handle, it lifts the rubber cap and allows water to flush the bowl. My one tangible achievement.

This explains the popularity of the Pick Your Own Apples orchards in Minnesota: highly educated people doing migrant labor for the pleasure of the experience. For some of us, pumping our gas at self-service stations is as close to physical labor as we come.

The absolute dumbest thing I’ve seen on Facebook is “Find out who you are and be that person and live that truth and everything else will come,” which I saw last week. Anyone who actually believes it should not be allowed to handle sharp objects. We are contradictions is who we are and we need to get them under control and learn to be of use to the world around us.

“Find out who you are and be that person.” That is exactly what our commander-in-chief has done and that’s why half of America is whooping and hollering — they love that he makes the other half of America grind their molars.

I found out who I was when I was 13 — I was a genius, which nobody else knew but I went off to college to channel my teen angst into poetic prose and after a couple years, I got a writing teacher named Bob Lindsay, a former Marine, whose rule was: one misspelling and your paper gets an automatic F, no ekseptions. After your brilliant writing got a couple of flunks, you learned a basic skill: reading your own elegant prose, word by word. And that made you a copy editor, a skill that lasts a lifetime, one that people are willing to pay money for.

Forget about who you are — find work to do and when you’re young, try out as many kinds of work as possible. Be a dishwasher, a lawn mower, wait on table, tend small children, show aging writers how to do crunches and squats, meanwhile push forward in school and find a competency that satisfies you. The goal is to make your way as an independent person and avoid the sort of narcissism that takes you down avenues of nincompoopery that require other people to take charge of you.

My team came back in the ninth and made a good showing and only an incredible catch by the Yanks’ Aaron Hicks beat us. Aaron was standing in centerfield so evidently he knew who he was. You can be a centerfielder simply by standing there. But it was his dash at the crack of the bat and his great leap with glove extended, crashing chest-first on the warning track and not dropping the ball that won the game. But we’ll be back. Just you wait.

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We’ve had monster thunderstorms in Minnesota this summer, which gave me the chance to be manly and reassuring and tell my wife not to worry as we drove through the dark of midday, bolts of lightning like bombs bursting in air. And indeed, we arrived safely at our destination, a luncheon honoring an old pal of mine whom I’ve known since we were in first grade together.

About thunderstorms I know less than the average medieval peasant. I majored in English and stayed away from the sciences lest I appear to be stupid, as a result of which I became stupider. As a would-be poet in college, I wrote poems in which weather was a device to indicate the poet’s own mood — weather as narcissism! — so there were gloomy moonless nights and sometimes rain but never thunderstorms — too dramatic for a Minnesotan.

Somehow we young poets of back then got the idea that despair was the truest sign of intelligence and sensitivity. Now I look around at young people and see a greater interest in comedy and satire, a healthy development for which our president should surely get a good deal of credit.

The luncheon we drove through the storm to attend was to honor Billy who grew up out in the sticks with me. We attended a three-room schoolhouse, two grades to each room, which now is considered quite progressive, but in our case it was an innovation due to lack of funds. I envied him because his family had a TV, a huge cabinet with a screen the size of a coffee saucer and I hung around his back door until I was invited in.

In high school, he was on the football team and I went down the despairing poetry route, and we lost contact until our class’s 25th reunion where we had a long conversation and I learned that his mother, back in his youth, had been in and out of mental hospitals, which had been a big secret. It was the Fifties and people tried to live up to the sunny Betty Crocker/Better Homes & Gardens model of family life and hid what didn’t match up. He had grown up with that secret and he went into the mental health field, running a community program and then became the CEO of a large state mental hospital.

He retired from the job and the luncheon was in his honor and the woman emceeing it said a few words about Billy and then opened the floor to anyone who cared to say a few words. So I did. I told them how, in grade school, Billy was the one who took on the class bullies. They liked to pick on Ronnie, a large slow boy with a learning disability that back then there was no word for. The bullies liked to throw Ronnie down and kick him and Billy jumped in and grappled with them. He did this over and over. I stood and watched. I was a very accomplished avoider of trouble. I went through twelve years of public school and never got punched. Remarkable.

Standing up for the underdog is a noble tradition in America and I see it wherever I look. People once shunned and put off in a corner are now treated with respect and offered support and assistance. Caregivers, therapies, programs for special needs, so many merciful lines of work that didn’t exist back then. The president is a vicious bully but it’s a dying breed.

Comedy and compassion are the trademarks of the upcoming generation and good for them. GPS is fine but without it we could always learn to read maps again. Facebook is okay but if it went away, we could learn to sit with people over coffee and conduct conversations. Comedy and compassion are what you need to make your way in the world. My ancestor David Powell, leading a wagon train through the Colorado mountains in 1859, wrote to his wife: “Hard rain & wind storm. Cattle stampede & we had to be on horseback all night. Awful night. Men all tired and want to leave. Horses all gave out & men refused to do anything. Wet all night. Worked all day hard in the river trying to make the cattle swim & did not get one over. Had to turn back sick and discouraged. Have not got the blues but am in a Hell of a fix.” In other words, don’t lose heart.

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