Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 67

I stopped in a cafe on Sunday after church to get awakened from a feeling of blessedness and who should I run into but my Anoka High School gym teacher Stan Nelson, who is 99 years old and still talking and making sense. He looked at me and said, “Are you still having trouble with chin-ups and the rope climb?” I was 17 at the time and now I’m 76, and I told him that I’ve managed to stay out of situations that might require me to climb a rope or lift myself up by a horizontal bar, so the answer is, No, it’s no trouble at all.

“You’re looking good,” he said. He’s looking good too, hearty and keen, as if 99 is what he was aiming for all along. “You flunked the physical for football, didn’t you,” he said. I said, “Yes. Heart valve. They fixed it in 2001.” I opened my shirt and showed him the surgical scar on my sternum. He said he didn’t think I would’ve liked football anyway. I agreed with him about that.

It made me happy to see a man of 99 enjoying his life. It puts everything else into perspective, all the mopey poetry I wrote in college, the long single-spaced anguished letters written to friends under the influence of Kafka and Kierkegaard. Self-conscious misery is for the young; old age is the time to cheer up.

I was brought up by people who went through the Great Depression and the war and who told me how hard life could be and I matriculated into prosperous times when I put myself through college working part-time in the scullery and could still have a beer now and then. I’ve been independent ever since. I never confided my problems to anybody; I just let them go unexpressed and eventually they blew away like dry leaves. Or they became quirks. I was lucky. I married well. I got my heart sewn up by a surgeon and now I’m older than most of my aunts and uncles. I went to church and was forgiven and took Communion and now my old gym teacher is pleased to see me.

Minneapolis is near where I grew up on the Mississippi. The city has risen, spread, renovated, beautified itself since I was a boy — the old factories and warehouses are now expensive condos — and it’s lovely to walk around the old hometown, one foot in the past, while looking at the unimaginable present, the enormous towers, the male couples, the young women checking their cellphones, the ordinariness of being among people of color: that didn’t exist back then.

I’m at peace with all of it and a great deal more. The children of my friends are engaged in good works, trying to help people addicted to opioids and heroin whose lives have fallen apart, who live in ragged encampments, desperate families with small children, a scene of wretchedness out of Dickens’s Oliver Twist in the midst of my prospering city. I admire the doers of good works. I worry that they’ll forget to go to the state fair and ride the Ferris wheel in the dark and laugh and enjoy their cheese curds.

Life is good. Power and influence are illusory. Rich people often get lousy health care. Doctors don’t give thorough digital prostate exams to CEOs. Famous people are more likely to die in stupid accidents because their handlers are afraid to say, “Stop. That’s crazy.”

We live in treacherous times but so did Thomas Keillor who survived the five week voyage from Yorkshire in 1774 and my ancestor Prudence Crandall who got booted out of Connecticut in 1831 for admitting young women of color to her school and so she fled to Kansas where she campaigned for women’s suffrage. She was a Methodist. I like to imagine her sitting on a porch in Kansas, writing fierce polemics against male supremacy and the racist killjoys who blight the landscape, and at the same time enjoying the music of meadowlarks and the taste of tomatoes eaten off the vine and the pleasure of shade in the midst of brilliance. To change the world, you must start out by loving it. It’s fine to march but don’t forget to dance. The Lord is gracious. Come unto his gates with thanksgiving. In other words, get over yourself. It isn’t about you. Grab the rope and pull yourself up. Try. Try again.

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A mockingbird couple has set up housekeeping in a tree in our backyard and the male goes crazy whenever we set foot in his territory, which I guess means that their children have hatched and are at that perilous point in life when you’re about to fly. When we slip out back for supper, he shrieks at us from the corner of the yard, far from the nest, and flies from branch to branch to fence, cursing us, threatening to peck our eyes out. He’s a good father. The mother stays on the nest and he exercises his toxic mockingbird masculinity and yells bloody murder.

It’s been a week of blissful summer weather and so we sit back there evenings, sometimes mornings, especially now that our own fledgling has flown off to summer camp. She tried to hide it but she was eager to leave and we’ve not heard a word from her since. She’s a sociable kid, a busybody, a member of the gang, who loves drama, and life at home as an only child is much too sedate. To be the daughter of a writer means hanging around a silent inert parent who is of less interest than a scarecrow. Camp means swimming, hiking, gardening, camping with a gaggle of equals. There’s no comparison.

Once in a blue moon, she calls. If we text her, she responds with a word or two. I’ve given her several postcards, stamped, addressed to me, which is a joke. The chance of her writing a postcard to her father is zero to minus. She and I hug when she’s home and sometimes she walks over to my laptop and says, “Make me laugh,” so I do. She and I share a keen sense of humor involving bodily functions and I know her vulnerabilities and though she folds her arms and looks very stern, I can make her fall apart. Her mother handles discipline, hygiene, manners, and education, and my department is comedy.

I miss her and at the same time I’m grateful that she finds pleasure elsewhere. Meanwhile, a tiny feathered father is yelling at me to stay away from his kids or else face death.

My love and I sit at a table in the shade of a tree and pick at our summer salads, gorgeous tomatoes and cucumbers, greens, chopped peppers and onions, anointed with oil and vinegar, and we carry on the conversation that is at the heart of any happy marriage. We met thirty years ago, a lunch date, and I was taken by the fact that she was funny and concise and never at a loss for words, which is still true. I am an old man now and she somehow remains 35, same as then. I experience sudden gaps in memory, like walking along a sidewalk and suddenly a ditch appears, when I can’t come up with the word for old-age confusion — dentistry — diminution — sensual — pretension — and have to slip-slide around it, and she ignores this and leads the conversation onto solid ground.

I could go on living like this for a long long time, two people under a tree in a backyard, watched over by a ferocious bird, waiting for our child to call. When she does, often it is only for a minute: we hear girl talk in the background and laughter and then she says, “Can I call you back later?” and we say yes and she’s gone. Life is good. Of course disaster can strike at any time — last week we had supper with a friend who described a visit to a park where she tripped on a curb and had to go to the ER and wound up spending two weeks in the hospital for reconstruction — and I am aware of that though I choose not to discuss it over salads. I am aware of a whole string of beloved relatives and friends who are gone because they were born too early to be able to enjoy the medical advances that would’ve enabled them to live longer. I miss them and I try to live up to their example of fidelity and humor and kindness.

I’m glad we traveled to Portugal in June and I am looking forward to baseball in July and the return of our daughter in August, but this is the good life as I know it, a day of work followed by a conversation with my lover in the shade of the backyard, feasting on salad, and speaking quietly to a fellow father, assuring him that I intend no harm. That’s my goal right now. No harm.

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I have returned from a week in Portugal and a little village where we attended our nephew’s wedding and enjoyed lavish feasting and shameless dancing and people hugging each other left and right. There was liquor involved but mostly it sprang from lack of self-consciousness. Everybody knew each other except for us Americanos; there was nothing to hide. After the wedding, I saw men hugging other men, if you can believe such a thing. The father of the bride hugged the groom and squeezed him hard.

I’m from Minnesota. I associate male hugging with pickpockets. I don’t recall ever hugging or being hugged by another person of the male persuasion. My people shook hands. We were cautious people and didn’t want to be thought “too forward.”

The feast and dance took place at the bride’s parents’ farmhouse and I noticed the great freedom that her father enjoyed in his enormous garage. Several motorcycles in stages of repair, tractor parts, many gizmos and whatchamacallits around in no apparent order. Antique clocks and tools, implements, machine parts, tchotchkes, buckets of miscellaneous bolts and screws. Also a good deal of junk.

All of this was attractive to me. And so when I came back to America and watched the Democratic debates, I was looking for a candidate who would open the door to feasting and dancing and hugging and the basic freedom of owning stuff for which there is no good explanation. I don’t see Biden or Sanders or Warren or Harris as being that candidate. They all stayed behind their lecterns.

And so I come, for the umpteenth time in my life, to realize how irrelevant politics is to happiness.

Nobody wants to hear this, but I’ll say it anyway: the Current Occupant hasn’t changed much. He’s ridden along on a wave of prosperity that began during the Obama years and he’s issued thousands of twitters and scowled and threatened and called people names and he’s shown great cruelty to people who can’t vote, but when it comes right down to it, the daily weather forecast matters far more than anything he does in Washington.

As we descend into the 2020 presidential campaign, the very number 2020 reminding us to seek Clear Sharp Vision, let us agree that the importance of the presidency is greatly exaggerated. The office gets so much attention because journalists are lazy and it’s easier to write about one guy than to, say, spend six months in Iowa and write about American agriculture. Woodward and Bernstein didn’t get into the movies played by Redford and Hoffman by writing about corn and soybeans. But the effect of Watergate on the lives of Americans was less than that of a solar eclipse.

No president can make America great. God is the judge of greatness, and meanwhile the challenge is to educate children, do business, feed and doctor people, preserve farmland and wilderness, deal with the real world, look for the least worst outcome.

The guy who affected my life most was LBJ, whose Vietnam War obsessed me in my 20s and whose Medicare is a lovely benefit in my 70s. In between, there was Nixon whom we liberals loathed for reasons I can’t recall and Gerald Ford who pardoned him and thereby was defeated by the Georgia Sunday school teacher. The movie actor I remember for his affable Irish mug but don’t ask me to write 500 words about Iran-Contra because I can’t and neither can you. Then came the Ivy League Texan and the last of the Arkansas liberals and Dubya who tried so hard to be presidential and then our first Kenyan president and now this New Yawk showman who has the distinction of being the first man elected to the office by being an out-and-out jerk and mooning the media and giving the stinky finger to whoever irks him and yet what has he done other than offend most Americans? Not that much.

Most of the real damage done by presidents falls on distant lands while life in these States keeps chugging along and so when I look at the Democrats in the race and ask whom I favor, I say, “Anybody who doesn’t wear a ducktail and who attends church now and then and doesn’t blather.” We need a new story. And now I’m going to take my wife by the hand and walk down the street and find a café with a table under an umbrella and order salad and an iced tea and enjoy some conversation about the future. That’s where happiness lies, out in front of us.

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We came to Portugal knowing only the words for apology (desculpe) and gratitude (obrigado) and were stunned by the beauty on every hand, the seaside city of Porto on the river Douro, the narrow twisty streets and red tile roofs over skinny passageways into stone-paved courtyards, the crowd on the stone wharf at night, the girl swinging flaming torches and an old man singing to his guitar about his many heroic disappointments.

We came here to attend a wedding and meanwhile I was happy to sit at a table in a café, surrounded by strangers, eating a meal such as my mother would have served, pork roast and cabbage and boiled potatoes. The language barrier feels very comforting: Ignorância! It sounds even better in French: ignorance. Italian: ignoranza. German: ignoranz. I impersonated intelligence long enough; time to be myself.

Our teachers taught us that it was important to be well-informed on current events so that we could be good citizens, and The Washington Post’s motto, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” has nice alliteration, but does everything depend on a bunch of Eagle Scouts wading through tall grass with flashlights? I relish being anonymous and powerless in a place where I understand nothing. Nobody cares what I think about Whatsisname and Whatchamacallit. We’re just people here. The waiter pours another glass of water. “Obrigado,” I say.

At home in a beautiful land

Whose language I don’t understand,

Here for a wedding

And gladly forgetting

The rational life I had planned.

The language barrier

Makes me feel merrier:

Vive l’amour. C’est bon. Très grand.  

The wedding was beautiful, like in fables. A 300-year-old stone chapel packed with friends and family, European, American, Asian. The bride in her mother’s white wedding gown proceeding up the aisle on her father’s arm as someone sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” the groom (who had arrived on a motorcycle) waiting in his pressed blue suit with the bearded Brazilian priest in immaculate white and gold. The ceremony in Portuguese, a resonant language. The couple recited their vows to each other, the American groom doing well with Portuguese, and they kissed the other’s hand as they slipped the ring onto the other’s finger. The four parents of the two stood facing them and held out their right hands and blessed them. The priest nodded and the husband and wife kissed and the place erupted in cheers and whistles and a long ovation. We all hustled outside and as the couple came out, young men jumped up and grabbed the chains that hung from the bells and rang them loudly over the rooftops. The couple got into the back seat of a car festooned with ribbons and her brother drove them across the valley and through town, horn honking. We went to her parents’ farm where long formal tables were set up in the yard under strings of lights. There were speeches. We feasted on ham from a hog roasted whole on a spit and champagne and salad and fresh rolls and then the cake was cut and the band played a fast salsa tune and the bride and her dad danced and then all of us. The dancing went on until five in the morning, or so I am told. There was a great deal of hugging, men hugging men, tight meaningful embraces.

What I especially remember is the young woman in the wheelchair, unable to walk or talk, but she seemed aware. She was the daughter of the cantor at the church. All evening, she was surrounded by people, uncles, cousins, holding her hand, caressing her cheek, stroking her hair. She laughed at the music. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. In this insignificant village in this small country, people care about each other, though some have left for better jobs in France, and their love for the community is exemplified by their care for her: nobody should be left out, no matter if she speaks or not.

It rained a little, which means good luck. I danced in the rain with my wife and I kissed the bride on both cheeks and told her I will remember that night for as long as I live. I’m an old man so I can keep that promise. And then I walked over and embraced her father who was wearing a sprig of mint over his ear. “You’re a beautiful man,” I said. “Thank you for creating this beautiful daughter.” Somebody translated it into Portuguese. He was moved. He didn’t know what to say.

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I’ve landed in London where there are no elevators, only lifts, and where the signs say “Offices To Let,” which at first looked like “Office Toilet” to me, and where you see “Look Left” or “Look Right” painted on the pavement at every pedestrian crossing — and I wonder, How many of my countrymen looked the wrong way and were crushed by a lorry before the Brits painted the warnings? Nebraska wheat farmers, New York stockbrokers, confident successful men who brushed off their wives’ warning to look both ways. “I know how to cross a street, dang it,” they said and stepped in front of a double-decker bus and were erased from the face of the earth and their dust flown home for the memorial service.

They spoke of the kindly delight

In family, how he fought the good fight,

And nobody said

As they spoke of the dead,

“Why didn’t he look to the right?”

This is one peril and another is the English language. You sit down in the Middle Eastern café and order the lamb kebab and the waiter asks you a question in what sounds like English and you say, “Yes, thank you” and he brings a stew that turns out to be red-hot lava. The lamb died in a volcanic eruption. You gulp a glass of water, which spreads the toxins to your lower tract and now there is steam coming out of your shorts.

Other Americans are fascinated by the Royal Horseguards and the figures waving from the balcony, but I grew up in love with Stan Laurel and Flanders and Swann singing “Have Some Madeira, M’Dear,” and the funny way Peter Sellers said the name “Balham,” the music hall strut called the Lambeth Walk, and the young lady in the London revue who played a tune on the pennywhistle and then, blushing, put another pennywhistle up her skirt and played a duet. Pure silliness that we colonists seem incapable of.

On Sunday our cousin Lulu rode up on her bicycle from Notting Hill, a Swede from Stockholm, who’s become a TV producer here and who speaks English with a lovely accent, part high tea, part fried herring. I test her English. She doesn’t know “perfidy” or “preposterous” and has only a faint idea of “propensity.” No problem. If the Brits go through with Brexit, she can get dual citizenship and stay if she wishes, but she’s 29 and a year from now she could be in Sweden or Los Angeles or New York. At the moment, she’s excited about an August trip to Texas. She’ll go to Austin, go line dancing, see a rodeo, ride through the Hill Country on horseback. After that, she hopes to lose her job so as to be free again.

To sit in Hyde Park with a Swedish millennial who’s looking forward to the next thing is a perfect Sunday afternoon. I went to church, confessed the sins of my narrow old age and then I got to listen to her, laughing, poking at a salad, the other hand swooping around. The world belongs to her generation, mine is off the hook.

What’s wrong with Brexit is that it’s out to put back the old barriers and frustrate the young and ambitious and humorous, trying to put the future back in the box, but the young shall prevail by virtue of outliving the old buggers. And beyond that, millennials have a sense of comedy, of the odd bounce that turns out beautifully. The one sitting across from me certainly does. She’s dating a French man but doesn’t like being told what to do. She will retrain him or find a better model. Or maybe move to L.A. She dances in her seat as she talks. She has fewer regrets than the average cabbage.

The true source of happiness is something hopeful whirring around in the future. It’s almost all you need sometimes and Lulu has a whole lifetime almost. I imagine Mr. Trump standing at the curb inveighing against the Mexicans, looking left, and getting leveled by a delivery boy on a bike with a bag of containers of volcanic lava. I imagine Boris Johnson taking office and finding it to be a toilet. Or no, it’s a lift. He presses Up and it becomes an elevator and takes him to an elevation of 20,000 feet. The air is thin. There is a Down and an Out. He presses Down and it turns upside down. Monty Python could make a whole sketch of this.

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I’ve been a grind for many years, chained to my oars, and I am in serious need of frivolity, so last Friday my wife and daughter and I boarded the Queen Mary 2 in New York and sailed out of the harbor and under the Verrazano Bridge bound for England with a dance band on board, a casino, deck chairs where one can lounge and doze and do nothing meaningful whatsoever. A big band plays nightly in the enormous ballroom and there is a multitude of serious dancers on the floor who know the jitterbug, the foxtrot, the tango — really know them, don’t just stand and sway rhythmically — and a handsome Irishman belts out “Night and Day” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” There are impenetrable Brit accents everywhere and elaborately polite service — waiters who say “Thank you” at every opportunity. The bottle of English ginger ale says, “Upend before pouring” — when was the last time you saw “upend”? The sign in the toilet says that the plumbing does not operate on a “cistern system” but a pressure system so do not flush while seated. There is the sunny aft deck where I can lie and not read a book. So what do I do? I think about work.

It’s easier for a carpenter. Security personnel will not allow you to bring a power saw aboard a ship. But a writer brings a laptop and a briefcase with him and he is right back where he started.

This is why I write limericks. They’re trivial and nobody will publish them, so writing them is not like actual work with a purpose, it’s more like throwing flat rocks sidearm to make them skip on the surface of a lake or river.

I left my home on the prairie

To sail away on the Queen Mary

In black tie and tux

With big muckety-mucks

Fred Astaire and Cher, maybe Cary

Grant, hiding in the library.

I’m paying big bucks

For six days deluxe

In salt air, enjoying myself

On the Atlantic

Where the Titanic

Sank back in nineteen and twelve.

We are heading for a wedding in a village in Portugal where, after the vows are said, there will be an all-night party, which apparently is traditional there. I can’t remember having been to an all-night party ever in my life. I come from people who, after a wedding, head for the kitchen to help clean up. Even the bride and groom do. I guess this will be different.

Meanwhile, we’re halfway across the Atlantic, and the vibration and slight rocking of the ship make a person drowsy. We sit in a half-stupor staring at the vast flatness of water around us, walking the promenade deck, one-third mile in circumference, burning off the pastries. We sit in a lounge and drink tea and people nearby ask us where we’re from and I overcome my Minnesotaness and join in a conversation. Their name is Sweeney, they’re from Virginia, he was in military intelligence, she teaches freshman composition at a college. We order another pot of tea.

It’s a sedate life on the ocean, no need for sedation. In the fitness center, the young and restless are pushing themselves to exhaustion, and in the lounge, the old and comfortable are savoring the lack of newspapers so there’s nothing to be angry about. (There’s a TV screen in the cabin but I don’t care to figure out how to turn it on.) If I wished, I could go to a salon and hear a lecture about wasps, the kind who sting. Instead I go hear an Irish comedian tell old jokes — the one about the pope driving the limo, the one about the vacuum cleaner salesman visiting the rural cottage, the one about the man walking by the lunatic asylum, and it’s lovely to hear them again, delivered with a lilt.

Meanwhile, I walk around with pen and paper. It gives me a sense of purpose. I come from serious people. Relaxation was not our strong suit. I might be happier in a black tux waiting on customers. So I pretend to be on vacation while pursuing my career as a limericist.

I sit on a ship on the sea

And experience infinity

With nothing to do

Except look up at you

While you sit staring at me.

It’s a profound limerick, what Sartre and Camus and Kierkegaard were going for, and I did it in five lines. I’m happy.

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It was graduation weekend at my daughter’s school and so I hung out with emotional dads for a couple of days and at the graduation dance I got a little teary-eyed myself. It was the Father-Daughter dance and we shimmied and shook to “I Saw Her Standing There” and then a slow waltz to “Wonderful World” and I sang the words to her, “I hear babies cry, I watch them grow; they’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know.” And I meant them.

The school is a boarding school for kids with learning differences and the day we left her there years ago was an agonizing day, walking away from a weeping child in the arms of a teacher, and driving down the road telling each other we were doing the right thing and not believing it. She didn’t change her clothes for four days because her mother had hugged her in those clothes and she wanted to remember.

And then it was Sunday and the bagpiper led them out of the gym and they stood on the green grass and on the count of three, they flung their mortarboards in the air. I took a picture and it shows my daughter’s cap flying higher than anyone else’s.

Fathers of daughters at graduation are stunned by the rush of memories, the transformation of child into woman in high heels, the urge of patriarchy to lock the child in a tower, and the sheer pride at observing her freewheeling independence and acuity. It’s a day when toxic masculinity seems to fall away from a man and he feels much older, a little unsteady, a man on the sidelines of the world she seems at home in.

I am married to a virtuous woman who recycles everything, even bottle caps and bubblegum wrappers, and regards a hamburger as a form of cannibalism, and reads aloud to me stories about injustice and human suffering, so my toxicity has been diminished by association. As a child, I was very close to my aunts, not to my uncles. The first characters in books that I deeply identified with were girls, Laura Ingalls and Anne Frank. My dad wasn’t a hunter, he was a gardener and a reader, and he had no interest in football. I never heard him curse. My daughter knew him when she was a toddler; he lay in bed, dying, and he played with her by wiggling his toe under the blanket and when she grabbed for it, he moved it away. She was delighted. Making her laugh was a last great pleasure for him.

The girls of the Class of 2019 struck me as quite sure of themselves and at the same time less judgmental than the girls of my day. Much less. Toxic femininity has not struck them, as it struck women my age: the poisons that beauty products put into the environment, the pesticides, carcinogens, plasticizers, formaldehyde, coal tars, petrolatum, that enable youthful skin and shiny hair. Whatever social pressure has produced this ridiculous $805 billion global industry, it mostly comes from women themselves and is delusional: I have never in my life heard a man comment critically on a woman’s skin tone. Men love women who are witty, observant, who will stand up to us when we are wrong, and yet love us.

Men use soap and water, we’re out for an outdoors look that goes back to Wild Bill Hickok and Crazy Horse. Crazy Horse did not use beauty products except for war paint now and then. He was a mystic and his religious certainty enabled him to ride into battle against George Custer, who was extremely vain about his appearance and led his men into disaster.

I don’t know a single man who uses facial cleanser. Nor any married man either. Even in the Information Age, we like to look weather-beaten, like sailors or sheepherders. We have a toxic president who pays far too much attention to his hair, but he’s very far from representative of the gender. I am no expert in gender studies, but my theory is that male toxicity faded in the 1950s when Little Richard sang falsetto on “Lucille” and then Pete Seeger on “Wimoweh,” and Brian Wilson and then the Beatles. At the Saturday dance, when the band sang “I’ll never dance with another,” all of us dads sang that high “Oooooo,” holding our daughters in our arms. That was a moment, let me tell you. It was as thrilling that night as it was in 1963. Try it yourself sometime, pal.

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Memorial Day and my love and I walked out in the park to observe the young and restless, the old and rickety, soaking up the sunshine. The laziest day of the year, meant to remember the insane fury of war. Contented families, families making an effort to ignore each other, kids teetering along on bikes or skateboards, dozens of runners each with his or her signature stride (lope, lunge, trot, traipse, scoot, sprint, stagger), picnickers lounging in the shade and dogs sniffing other dogs and toddlers acquainting themselves with the wonders of grass.

No soldiers in sight. I wore a tan linen suit and black T-shirt, Madame wore a blue sleeveless dress. We passed a table where a man sat at a typewriter, next to a sign that said “Free Poetry.” A man sat opposite him, a little boy on his lap, waiting for their poem to be written.

I thought of the American war dead but only briefly when a helicopter passed overhead, which made me think of Vietnam, the war I evaded. We honor the dead of that war, but with remorse, same as the Confederate dead, the farm boys who fought for the plantation owners. I didn’t care to go to Vietnam; I preferred to forget about loyalty, reverence, bravery, obedience and the rest of the Boy Scout Law and devote myself to dreaminess and books and long conversations with interesting women. So shoot me.

I visited the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington Cemetery years ago and watched the Army sentry pace his course and then the Changing of the Guard, an elaborate ceremonial with many moving parts, carried out quietly, routinely, night and day, since 1937. Impressive but mystifying.

If only the discipline and dedication that go into it could be transferred to Congress and the White House, some wars would not need to be fought.

My goal is to live long enough so that nobody who comes to my funeral remembers me. It’ll take place at a mega-mortuary called WalMort, where a recorded choir sings “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” and the eulogy is by my last cleaning lady who talks about how good my aim at the toilet was, right up to the end.

It’s my memory I care about, not posterity’s. I remember most of Sir Walter Scott’s lines, “Breathes there the man with soul so dead who never to himself hath said, ‘This is my own, my native land.’ Whose heart has ne’er within him burned as home his footsteps he hath turned from wandering on a foreign strand.” I remember seeing Albert Woolson, the last surviving member of the Union Army, riding in a parade in Minnesota in 1954 and I looked into the eyes of a man who’d seen Abraham Lincoln’s funeral procession in 1865. I remember Grandma’s farm, the workhorses pulling the hayrack, the chickens running free, the outhouse. I remember standing in the midst of six thousand people in the old Methodist tabernacle in Ocean Grove, N.J., as they stood and sang “Glory, glory, hallelujah, His truth is marching on” and I looked to my left and there was Bruce Springsteen singing with them.

Rich people pay millions to put their names on buildings but usually the names are carved up over the entrance and nobody looks up there — we look down at the steps we’re climbing — meanwhile, people campaign to expunge the names of historic figures guilty of the wrong isms, perhaps change the name of the national capital from Washington, who was a slave owner, to Piscataway, the tribe that the land was snatched from, and rename the state Kathlamet and the river Columbia Walla Walla, which means “many waters.” Christopher Columbus was a perfectly dreadful person.

Good luck with that. Meanwhile my memory of Memorial Day is the pleasure of holding hands while walking and how my wife adjusts her quicker pace to mine. I remember the stranger we sat down next to in the coffee shop and how quickly and easily a conversation was struck up with her, about childhood and violin lessons and architecture and the attention-deficit president and the steady advance of technology and how nobody really knows where it is going. Three Americans with an amazing good deal in common choose to be sociable on a perfect summer day. Spacious skies, fruited plains, land where my fathers died and so will I, but not quite yet, thank you.

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It’s a privilege to have a doctor of medicine in the family and my family has two, one American, one Swedish. We dreamers and ideologues need to come into contact with science now and then. The Swedish doctor told us yesterday she is skeptical of the American practice of routine colonoscopies, that the profit margin on the procedure is very high and the rationale is modest at best. I’d never heard skepticism about colonoscopies before; it was like someone bad-mouthing mouthwash. I’ve been pro-colonoscopy because it feels good to get cleaned out and the muscle relaxant is so luxurious and pleasurable, and health insurance paid the freight so I didn’t give it a thought. Interesting.

The American one is retired and so available for consultation at all hours. I got him on the phone the other evening and ticked off my pulse and he told me not to worry, it was regular. I thought it was but I’m an English major; it’s good to get a second opinion from someone who passed biology.

I am blessed with faith in medicine, which saves a great deal of time looking into alternatives such as naturopathy, homeopathy, antipathy, and sympathy. If a man with horn-rimmed glasses, a stethoscope around his neck, a white smock, and a framed certificate on the wall handed me two red M&M’s, I would feel much better very soon after. I walk into a clinic and the smell of the antiseptic floor cleaner is reassuring to me.

This faith saves a person from morbidity in old age.

Back in my college years, I wrote dismal incoherent poems about death, and then I grew up, I read Tolstoy, I sat in a car with my arm around a girl who didn’t seem to mind, visited New York City, found a good job, got some experience in the world, and morbidity faded away. I’m 76 and I own a cemetery plot and I think about death less than I think about the Gadsden Purchase.

It is grievous though to read the recent report about the gradual extinction of species and ocean warming and ice cap melting and what our country may look like in another fifty years. Vast empty office parks, tribes of lawless drifters, mountains of wrecked cars. The prophet Jeremiah was a dark guy, nobody you’d invite to a party, who wrote: “Hear, O earth! Behold, I will certainly bring calamity on this people — I will punish you according to the fruit of your doings. I will kindle a fire in the forest, and it shall devour all things around it.” Bad enough but when scientists issue a jeremiad, it commands us to pay attention.

But three years ago, a choice was made. The electorate turned away the favorite, a woman who read scientific studies, finding her unlikable. She had serious Methodist virtues but it wasn’t what the middle of the country wanted that year. I saw her clearly once, working a rope line for more than an hour, a Secret Service man holding her firmly by the hips as she leaned over the rope and reached into the mass of arms and hands reaching out to her. She was encountering the crowd and making it look personal, with the sort of discipline your mother instills in you: those people waited three hours to see you so treat them right and make them feel special and forget that your back hurts and you need a toilet. She didn’t do bombast, didn’t do playground insults, and she paid a price for it.

No wonder so many millennials are in a fury. You graduate with a truckload of debt for a liberal arts education designed not to upset you and the only job you can find is waiting on tables, which is hard because you attended a progressive school where rote learning was forbidden and so you’re unable to add numbers except using your iPhone and meanwhile there are newspaper stories about human extinction and an angry narcissist is running the government. What to do?

Do as I do. Take it one day at a time. Lighten up. Count your blessings: GPS, YouTube, Google, a vast assortment of craft beers and salad bars in supermarkets. Figure out who your true friends are. Hold off on long-term planning until November, 2020, when we’ll have a clearer idea of the future. In the meantime, dance when you get the chance.

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I am drinking coffee this morning from a cup that says “Verum Bonum Pulchrum” — truth, goodness, beauty — an impossible ideal, but it’s my sister-in-law’s cup, not mine. Our apartment is undergoing window replacement so my love and I are being harbored by relatives. She sleeps in a handsome mahogany bed that belonged to her grandmother Hilda and I sleep on a hard single bed in the basement. Separation is good for a happy marriage like ours. We say good night and I trudge downstairs and lie in the dark on a skinny bed that is like the one I slept in when I was 17. So I close my eyes and it’s 1959 and I’m considering my prospects in life.

I was a mediocre student and so I decided to skip college and join a Trappist monastery in Dubuque, Iowa. I was brought up evangelical Protestant but their rule of silence was attractive to me and if you’re silent, who’s to know you’re Protestant? (Or know you’re not that bright?)  So I wrote to them, asking admission, and got a gentle rejection. And that was my last attempt at sanctity. As Robert Frost almost wrote but did not:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood

And I chose the one that led to Bonum

And was refused, so I took the path

To Amo, Amas, Amat, and that was easier.

Celibacy wasn’t going to work for me. I craved the comedy of marriage: two people physically attracted to each other but otherwise independent and free to express it, sometimes sharply — a comic plotline. Being married, I needed to earn money and I went into radio because it was easy. My dad was a carpenter and he worked so hard, he’d come home and fall asleep reading the paper and have to be awakened to come eat supper. I resolved to never work that hard and I haven’t. That’s why I don’t need a shoulder replacement and sometimes I still feel 17.

Radio was monastic at first, sitting alone in a studio at 6 a.m. And then I started a variety show, with musicians and actors, and that’s where I got my education. The monk Thomas Merton wrote: “We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have — for their usefulness.” And I think of the big stars who came on my show and found they enjoyed being there without needing to carry the freight. Martin Sheen, the TV president, enjoyed playing grifters and palookas. Willie Nelson sang a couple parodies of his songs. Allen Ginsberg came and read Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and was magnificent. He’d been the King of Beat long enough and loved venturing into the 19th century. Don and Phil liked coming out and doing the Everly Brothers for a few songs, but they were happy to mingle backstage and be themselves. Meryl Streep loved to sing duets, old elegiac songs she’d never do anywhere else.

Chet Atkins was a household name who was a sideman at heart. He could come out on stage and blow the audience away, but what he loved was sitting backstage with Johnny Gimble, Peter Ostroushko, Pat Donohue, Bill Hinkley, whichever musicians were in the mood, and playing an endless seamless medley of swing tunes, gospel, “Seeing Nellie Home,” “I Saw Her Standing There,” “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” whatever came to his mind. That was when Chet disappeared into his true self.

This happened to me a few weeks ago, doing a solo show, a benefit for an arts organization in upstate New York, unrehearsed since it was just me. Two old friends came backstage before the show and provided distraction right up to eight o’clock when the stage lights dimmed and I walked out to the microphone with nothing in mind except to sing Irving Berlin’s “All Alone” and then recite Shakespeare’s “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state.” There was no script. I flew blind for an hour and a half through the overcast of memory, the False Knight Upon The Road, Frost, Blake, “Annabel Lee,” Frankie and Johnny, no pause, no applause, and finally at 76 I felt anonymous and free, with Dickinson, Yeats, the babes in the woods, Casey at the bat, the audience singing “America,” and I was a Trappist at last, not doing but being.

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