Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 73

I walk around New York City on these perfect summer nights, sirens passing, helicopters chunking above, subway rumbling below, diners in sidewalk cafes, dogs walking their owners, and after a little while, I look for an excuse to sit down. I’m walking because I’m a sedentary guy who is scheduled to fly to Prague with my ambulatory wife who will want to see castles and parks and museums and who will be gratified if I can keep up with her. I don’t care about castles; I am a democrat. My favorite museum is in Cooperstown. But I shall be her consort, walking three steps behind, my head up, fulfilling my role.

Walking around the big city, whenever I see a lighted ballfield, I turn in that direction and find a spot by the backstop and sit. Manhattan is an island, short on space, and so the Parks Department likes to lay out four ballfields in one rectangle, the four home plates in the corners, the diamonds aiming in toward the middle, so that the outfielders are intermingled with each other. A center fielder may backpedal for a long fly ball and make the catch next to someone else’s second base. It’s a whole new ballgame. Interdependence is the key, which is an amazing thing in a country as divided as ours is. I know New Yorkers who’ve never been to Kansas. Hard for me to accept that as normal.

It’s sort of like the great Rose Reading Room at the Public Library on 42nd Street, that hushed chapel where a couple hundred people sit silently at long tables, reading or tapping on laptops, each in his or her separate bubble, bubbles that may be fragile and so a severe decorum is observed. The little skritch of an iPhone camera would violate it. So people don’t. It’s basic cooperation, same as a shortstop saying, “You’re good, you’re good, you’re good” to reassure a backpedaling right fielder from next door to keep his eye on the fly ball, that his path is clear.

New York is a big sports town because a goodly percentage of the population is close enough to the poverty line to be aware of it and pro sports stardom is the fairy tale of poor kids growing up to be rich. I know Midwestern kids who have zero interest in athletics, whose passion is playing video games. There are not many multimillionaire video gamers and they don’t care.

Writing a best-selling novel was my fairy tale, and I’m completely over it now, but in the reading room, I like to imagine that the young African-American woman and the young Vietnamese guy at my table are entertaining that dream. American literature is leaning toward minority authors because that dream is powerfully attractive. A coming-of-age novel about an immigrant family with an abusive father and overwhelmed mother and a nerdy kid with a terrible stutter who, by Chapter 3, you realize is the author of the book. I know Midwestern writers who have zero interest in the novel, whose passion is poetry. There is one millionaire poet in America, Billy Collins, and all the others are earning less than $50K/year teaching creative writing.

My game these days is the memoir and, at 75, I am one of the oldest memoirists around. Most of them are in their 40s. I waited for some sort heartbreak that would make my memoir interesting, but nothing happened, and then I realized that I had married so well that life was likely to go on pleasantly into dementia and beyond, so I’m now almost finished with the first draft. It’s all about luck. People are going to resent it.

I think of the poets vs. the novelists on one diamond, and we memoirists, Shirts vs. Skins, on the adjacent one. I’m a Shirt, a writer who does not tell all. If I start to talk about my impoverished youth when I was sent to walk along the railroad track to pick up coal to heat our house and then I remember that there was no track near our house and anyway the trains were diesel, I realize I have wandered into the novelists field, and I yell, “Sorry!” and I come back. Same if I get too engrossed in describing the woods. The truth is, I was lucky. It could’ve been worse. I married blindly and well. None of us will make it to Cooperstown but it’s okay. A summer night in New York. Be grateful.

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I went to prom Saturday night at my daughter’s school, which parents all allowed to attend so long as we don’t get in the way. It was held in the gym, under the basketball hoops, boys in suits and ties, girls in prom dresses, a promenade of graduating seniors, the crowning of a king and queen, a loud rock band to discourage serious conversation. This is a school for kids we once called “handicapped,” now we say “learning challenged.” I went to public school: you stood on the corner, you boarded the bus, it took you to school. This school is one that each of us parents searched desperately for as our child sank into the academic slough.

I stood in the shadows watching the promenade and my heart clutched as it often does at this school. Some of the students look as ordinary as you or I, and others have an odd gait, quirky movements of head or arms, a twitchiness, a speech abnormality. My heart clutches at the sight because I recall clearly how cruelly we treated people like them when I was their age.

And then the band struck up “So Fine” (My baby’s so doggone fine, she sends those chills up and down my spine), and young hips started shaking. The band was a local fivesome, old guys my age, the lead guitarist going bald on top but still maintaining a white ponytail down to his butt, playing songs of my youth, sort of incongruous as if my high school prom had featured the Charleston and the Turkey Trot, but the kids were flying high and improvising, and then we were on to “Brown-Eyed Girl” and I saw a friend of my daughter out on the floor, a young woman who was terribly injured as an infant and now, at sixteen, is blind in one eye and walks with a lurch, one arm semi-paralyzed, and there she was on the dance floor, in transcendent ecstasy, dancing to Van Morrison played by old men.

She was utterly transported, surrounded by classmates, each with his or her own twitches and lurches, all of them dancing like mad, laughing and a-running, skipping and a-jumping, just as the song says, and singing “sha la la la la la,” and the blessed fact was that none of them seemed the least bit self-conscious. When I was that age, I kept a running score on the Cool-O-Meter. These kids were free of that. Six kids in a conga line went by, two boys leaped straight up and down, obese children shimmied with abandon. Their own (pardon me) handicaps had preserved them from the obsessive self-awareness that we normals were plagued by in our youth and still are today, the constant comparisons to others, our work vs. their job, our kids, our clothes, a whole checklist.

The lead guitarist played his five or six basic licks, and the kids danced as if possessed, including the girl in orthopedic shoes, hands over her head. It was a vision of paradise, where at last we shall all be equal in the eyes of the Lord. And then a tall girl named Elizabeth dashed up, threw her arms around me, and we boogied. I do not, in the normal course of things, ever boogie. It is not what I was brought up for. But she obliged me to boogie. And I sang “Sha la la la la la la la la la lah de dah.”

Sunday, the gym was packed for graduation. A bagpiper led the Class of 2018 in, most of whom I recognized from the dance the night before. I sat there, tissue in hand, as one by one, the graduates came to the microphone and spoke their piece. I once made my living speaking into microphones, which came easily to me, and I could hear the enormity of their challenges, managing their tics, working around the blocks and stutters, and I was proud beyond proud of their valor. The president of the class, a tall Liberian girl, spoke, movingly, imploring us all to get to know each other for who we are, not for what we look like.

My daughter and I stood in the sunlight, watching the recessional go by, and she pointed out a favorite teacher of hers and said, “She and her wife have a little boy who I babysit.” The phrase “she and her wife” is dramatic to me, and to my daughter it is unremarkable, just as race is and ethnicity. Don’t believe everything you read. We are moving on.

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I’ve just done a sensible thing and boxed up a couple thousand good books that I’m never in this lifetime going to read and packed them off to my old high school library, mostly classics and histories and art books, an impressive sight on my shelves, but as an author, I don’t feel right about books as décor. So off they went, the unread essays of Emerson and Montaigne, Moby-Dick, Plato, the letters of Mark Twain, off to the library where I, at fourteen, was taken by Mencken and Dickens.

It’s good to have done something sensible. I haven’t done a lot lately for peace and justice and brotherly love, but I did give stuff I don’t need to people who will use it.

Get out of the car and walk: another sensible thing. I took a walk into a neighborhood I hadn’t walked in before and saw an old lady in a frilly white skirt and ratty old sweater, twirling around and singing, “Jesus, I sing your praises — Jesus, I’m glad you’re in my life,” and letting out little whoops, having a personal experience in public, and then she yelled at me, “What you looking at?”

I liked that. She was maybe messed up, but still she didn’t accept being an object of curiosity. She said, “Are you praising the Lord every day?” It was an authentic moment I wouldn’t have gotten if I’d been driving my car.

Another sensible thing: do your work. Make yourself useful. Less attitude, more competence. My line of work is writing, which is like carpentry except it’s 9/10ths demolition. I went to college, where I learned some mannerisms and where my best writing teacher was an old Marine named Bob Lindsay who believed that people learn by experiencing pain. He awarded an F to any written assignment that had so much as one spelling error in it. We elegant stylists were horrified, but we did learn to read our copy up close and when you do that, you see what you’ve actually written, and you cut out your mannerisms.

Competence is hard for a writer, hence the 9/10ths demolition, and as I get older, I admire competence more and more. I find it at the auto repair shop I go to, also at the clinic where they clean my teeth. The one time I called 911, I was privileged to observe an extremely high level of competence. I saw it in the wedding of Harry and Meghan and also among the cashiers at our supermarket, some of whom make me smile and others who don’t think that’s their job.

One competency that is available to everyone is the well-told joke. A good joke is a precise construction, like a paper glider, and either it flies or it doesn’t. I say to the cashier, “You heard about the trouble at the insane asylum,” and she shakes her head — “The inmates were out in the yard yelling, 21! 21! And the guard went to look through a hole in the fence and they poked him in the eye with a stick and yelled, 22! 22!”

She says, “Which mental hospital was this?” The joke failed to fly.

I say, “The one for Eskimo Christians.”

She squints at me. “Eskimo Christians??”

“Eskimo Christians and I’ll tell you no lies.” This joke flies.

Telling a joke is a knack, like hammering a nail straight. It’s useful in certain situations. You’re in a bar with your cousin and his friends, none of whom you know, and you haven’t said much and they’re giving you odd sideways looks, and finally you say, “I heard about a tavern — I think it was out east, maybe Connecticut — and the bartender heard someone say, Hey, and he turned and there was a sheepdog sitting on the barstool. The sheepdog said, You ever meet a talking dog before? I’ll bet you haven’t. How about a drink for a genuine talking dog? And the bartender says, Sure, the toilet’s right down the hall.” It’s not a lot but it’s something. You tell it with a solemn face, you tell it in order, no U-turns, you omit irrelevancies such as the bartender’s hairstyle and the gender of the dog and the tune playing on the jukebox. It’s an okay joke and they smile, knowing that you’re not a sociopath and probably won’t poke them in the eye with a sharp stick. You may be an outsider, possibly Eskimo, but you’re a Christian.

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“Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.”

― Garrison Keillor, We Are Still Married: Stories & Letters

“Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known”

―Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days

“If you lived today as if it were your last, you’d buy up a box of rockets and fire them all off, wouldn’t you?”

―Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days

“I can see how I could write a bold account of myself as a passionate man who rose from humble beginnings to cut a wide swath in the world, whose crimes along the way might be written off to extravagance and love and art, and could even almost believe some of it myself on certain days after the sun went down if I’d had a snort or two and was in Los Angeles and it was February and I was twenty-four, but I find a truer account in the Herald-Star, where it says: “Mr. Gary Keillor visited at the home of Al and Florence Crandall on Monday and after lunch returned to St. Paul, where he is currently employed in the radio show business… Lunch was fried chicken with gravy and creamed peas”.”

―Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days

“The rich can afford to be progressive. Poor people have reason to be afraid of the future.”

―Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days

“Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk.”

― Garrison Keillor, The Book of Guys

“A person cannot coast along in old destructive habits year after year and accept whatever comes along. A person must stand up on her own two legs and walk. Get off the bus and go get on another. Climb out of the ditch and cross the road. Find the road that s where you want to go. … The only sermon that counts is the one that is formed by our actions. She would quit drinking and thereby show Kyle life is what you make it. A person can grab hold of her life and change things for the better. This happens all the time. We are not chips of wood drifting down the stream of time. We have oars.”

― Garrison Keillor, Pontoon

“Selective ignorance, a cornerstone of child rearing. You don’t put kids under surveillance: it might frighten you. Parents should sit tall in the saddle and look upon their troops with a noble and benevolent and extremely nearsighted gaze.”

― Garrison Keillor, Leaving Home: A Collection of Lake Wobegon Stories

“The living wander away, we don’t hear from them for months, years—but the dead move in with us to stay.”

― Garrison Keillor, The Keillor Reader

“Do you think it’s right for Christians to use the names of pagan gods for the days of the week?”

― Garrison Keillor, The Keillor Reader

“They did not weave their lives around yours. They had their own lives, which were mysterious to you.”

― Garrison Keillor, The Keillor Reader

“Don’t worry about the past and don’t try to figure out the future”

― Garrison Keillor, A Christmas Blizzard

“We are one country, and I remain a proud Unionist, happy to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and pledge allegiance, sing about the amber waves of grain, wish I was in the land of cotton, pick my teeth with a carpet tack, be in the kitchen with Dinah, hate to see the evening sun go down, take myself out to the ball game, walk that lonesome valley, and lean on the everlasting arms. I love this country. This is one of those simple dumb discoveries a man makes, like the night I came out of the New York hospital where I, a bystander at my wife’s travail, had held my naked newborn six-pound shining-eyed daughter in my two hands, and I walked around town at midnight stunned by the fact that what I had seen was utterly ordinary, everybody comes into the world pretty much like that. In the same spirit, I walk around St. Paul and think, This is a great country and it wasn’t made so by angry people. We have a sacred duty to bequeath it to our grandchildren in better shape than however we found it. We have a long way to go and we’re not getting any younger.”

–Garrison Keillor, Homegrown Democrat

“When you wage war on the public schools, you’re attacking the mortar that holds the community together. You’re not a conservative, you’re a vandal.”

― Garrison Keillor, Homegrown Democrat

“By God, no matter what Republicans say, the people of this country really do care about each other. We are not a cold people. By God, when John F. Kennedy said, “Ask what you can do for your country,” he spoke to this country’s heart and conscience.”

― Garrison Keillor, Homegrown Democrat

“What liberals must conserve is the middle class: the stable family who can afford to enjoy music and theater and take the kids to Europe someday and put money in the collection plate and save for college and keep up the home and be secure against catastrophe. This family has taken big hits in payroll taxes and loss of buying power and a certain suppressed panic about job security.”

― Garrison Keillor, Homegrown Democrat

“Republicans are all about Old Glory and school prayer and the sanctity of marriage and the Fatherhood of God but when it comes to actually needing help from them, you shouldn’t get your hopes up. They might send an ambulance or they might just send a Get Well card.”

–Garrison Keillor, Homegrown Democrat

“Beauty isn’t worth thinking about; what’s important is your mind. You don’t want a fifty-dollar haircut on a fifty-cent head.”

― Garrison Keillor

“We come from people who brought us up to believe that life is a struggle, and if you should feel really happy, be patient: this will pass.”

― Garrison Keillor

“A book is a gift you can open again and again”

― Garrison Keillor

“Going to church no more making you a Christian than standing in a garage makes you a car.”

― Garrison Keillor

“Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose.”

― Garrison Keillor

“Hurry up! Do it – get it done. You got work to do. Don’t put this off and don’t take the long view. Life is today and tomorrow, and if you are lucky, may be next week.”

― Garrison Keillor

“Lutherans don’t hold bingo games in the church basement. Lutherans are against fun in general, which is why for them, birth control has never been a big issue.”

― Garrison Keillor

“It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut, they couldn’t hear the barbarians coming.”

― Garrison Keillor

“People complain about the obscurity of poetry, especially if they’re assigned to write about it, but actually poetry is rather straightforward compared to ordinary conversation with people you don’t know well which tends to be jumpy repartee, crooked, coded, allusive to no effect, firmly repressed, locked up in irony, steadfastly refusing to share genuine experience–think of conversation at office parties or conversation between teenage children and parents, or between teenagers themselves, or between men, or between bitter spouces: rarely in ordinary conversation do people speak from the heart and mean what they say. How often in the past week did anyone offer you something from the heart? It’s there in poetry. Forget everything you ever read about poetry, it doesn’t matter–poetry is the last preserve of honest speech and the outspoken heart. All that I wrote about it as a grad student I hereby recant and abjure–all that matters about poetry to me is directness and clarity and truthfulness. All that is twittery and lit’ry: no thanks, pal. A person could perish of entertainment, especially comedy, so much of it casually nihilistic, hateful, glittering, cold, and in the end clueless. People in nusing homes die watching late-night television and if I were one of them, I’d be grateful when the darkness descends. Thank God if the pastor comes and offers a psalm and a prayer, and they can attain a glimmer of clarity at the end.”

― Garrison Keillor

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The lilacs are in bloom out at the old family homestead and it’s pleasant to stand by the bushes and smell them and recall that the outhouse used to stand a few feet away. Who does not feel his faith in resurrection strengthened by this news? We’ve all been stinkers at times but once we leave the body behind, we shall bloom in the life to come.

My ancestors settled on that land in 1880, and my father once drove a manure spreader in the field near the lilacs, pulled by a team of four horses. They were heading downhill and he maybe forgot to apply the brake and the spreader clipped the hind horses’ legs and they bolted and took off down the road, my dad hanging on for dear life. The spreader tipped over when the horses galloped around a corner and my father leaped clear and landed in a ditch, no bones broken. He wrote a clear account of this in a letter to the city girl he hoped to marry, a harrowing story about the fragility of life and how death waits for us when we least expect it and so we should take hold of love and happiness when it presents itself. It was a well-written narrative and it won her heart and that’s where I come from, a rare venture into journalism by a taciturn man.

I’ve found love and happiness, thank you, and what I’m looking for now is a new vocation, a purpose, a mission. A man can’t just lie in a hammock and identify birds. The birds don’t need us to tell them who they are. Travel for travel’s sake doesn’t interest me, nor sack races, sock hops, secular humanism, or psychics. I turn 76 soon and so there’s no time for retraining. I once wanted to be a waiter or a bus driver but those doors, I’m sure, have closed.

Meanwhile, something dreadful is surely waiting for me up ahead. Over the years, I have filled out thousands of forms and always checked the little box saying I accept the terms and conditions and never have I read those terms and conditions. Eventually those terms and conditions will come due. I know it and you know it.

Searching for a new purpose in life, I depend on my wife for guidance, as I do in so many matters. She tells me, “Smile at people. Offer your hand. Ask them how they are today and listen pleasantly as they tell you.” Somehow in my old age I’ve taken on a grim expression without meaning to. I’m happy as can be, contented and serene, and friends ask me if something’s wrong. Evidently my default face is that of an ogre.

My generation was not a lighthearted bunch. We produced Bob Dylan, who is not a guy you’d willingly go on a long car trip with. We were a skeptical, brooding, cranky bunch, and I can see that now when I hang out with my grandson. He is congenial and so are his friends and people his age. Totally. I see them walking around with their smartphones, which contain a GPS app that beeps when a friend is in the vicinity, and this app guides them to each other — the electronic lady voice says, “Coffee shop, 100 feet ahead on your left. Outdoor table by the door.” And the two friends sit down side by side and they text each other, “Hey how R U?” while checking their e-mail, Twitter, and Snapchat to see what their other friends are up to. If they are boys, they play a video game in which hooded assassins dash across a devastated landscape and wreak destruction and attempt to kill each other. If they are girls, they exchange pictures of their cats.

I don’t have the dexterity to do those things so I am limited to personal contact. But friendliness is a good enough vocation, I think, for these twilight years. I come from separatist fundamentalist people who sincerely believed that you are going to hell because you don’t accept the truth that was revealed to them. So it goes against my principles to befriend you but I’m going to do it anyway. I have nothing to sell you, don’t worry. I don’t care whom you voted for last time. I’m going to be friendly because my wife told me to be. When you’re loved by a person as good as she, you pay attention to what she says.

Have a wonderful day, friend. Thinking about you, wishing you all the best.

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There was so much good news last week. Gorillas appear to be thriving, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society, and there are about 361,919 of them, twice as many as had been believed. Humpback whales, who were nearly hunted out of existence in the 19th century, are making a comeback in the seas off Antarctica: the birth rate is on the upswing, according to a new study. (The animals are the size of a school bus and have a life expectancy similar to ours.) And a study at the University of Michigan shows that people who work out even 10 minutes a day tend to be more cheerful than those who don’t.

This is science, people. This isn’t fake news. These conclusions are based on actual facts established through observation by people who can count. What I learn from this is that it brightens your day to skip the front-page stuff about Washington and focus on science. Someday I expect to find a study showing that 75-year-old men who rode school buses as children have a longer life expectancy. That’s me.

I rode a school bus for six years, 12 miles each way morning and afternoon, on a highway in Minnesota, cornfields to the west, the Mississippi to the east. I stood at the end of a gravel road, a gawky kid with wire-rim glasses, wearing second-hand clothes, knowing there would not be an empty seat because mine was the last stop. The bus pulled up, the door opened, I climbed aboard, and the driver waited until I sat down before he started the bus. Nobody squeezed together to make room so I had to pick out a seat with skinny girls in it and hurl myself at them and hold on for dear life as they tried to shove me out when the bus went around a sharp curve. This is a fact.

I had emotional problems in my youth — who didn’t? — and a religious crisis and a search for identity, all of that — but the struggle for seating on the bus was my No. 1 problem. My mother had five other children so I didn’t bother her with this. The school had no grief counselors that I could discuss it with. I had to pull up my socks and fight for a few inches of seat, enough for one cheek, and hang on with all my might.

Now you know why I avoid public transportation. And when I fly, if I’m upgraded to First Class, my heart sings.

Six years of classmates resisting my physical presence had a big effect on me. I learned to not be put off by rejection, that all you need is one acceptance. Somewhere on the school bus of life is one beautiful person who will move over and make room for you. That is all you need.

The fellow passenger who has made room for me all these years happens to be a professional musician, trained to read tiny insect tracks on a page and perform as indicated while a man with wild hair waves a stick in the air. She is no slacker, in other words. She has run a marathon, given birth to a child, hiked alone through foreign landscapes, lived close to the poverty line in New York City, and recently read Anna Karenina. She tends the plants in the yard and knows their names. She is well-versed on social convention and has sound opinions about music, books, and design. She is more than capable.

It’s a comedy routine when she’s around and a lovely system of checks and balances. I say, “Let’s put a ping-pong table in the living room” and she says, “I’d rather we didn’t” and so we don’t.

She says, “You’re not wearing that tie with that shirt, are you?” “Not anymore,” I say. She points discreetly at her left nostril and hands me a tissue. She reminds me of the name of that woman with the glasses (Liz) whom I ought to know — I told my wife, “Her and me went to school together” so that she’d have the satisfaction of saying, “She and I went to school together.” “No,” I said, “You’re 15 years younger; you didn’t go to school with Liz and me.”

The loner with the guitar is the American hero, but I love a member of the orchestra, and try to submerge my individuality into a good marriage. The secret of civility is synchronicity. The gorillas and whales know that and now I think I do too.

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Live from the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, MN: jazz singer Inga Swearingen and gospel vocalist Jearlyn Steele perform, and the Guy’s All-Star Shoe Band welcomes Peter Ostroushko, Cindy Cashdollar, and Andy Stein. All this, plus the return of alternative-country band BR549.

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Dear Mr. Blue,
I am a corporate speechwriter and a copywriter. I am 55.5 and would like to meet the right man who enjoys words. I placed a personal ad but got a response from a man in Federal Prison. It seemed intrusive to ask how he landed himself there, so I didn’t respond. I’ve got many friends and I’m perfectly okay-looking. What should I be doing? Taking trips? Moving to another country with a shortage of middle-aged women? Making a systematic request to my entire list of acquaintances to ask them to produce one person? What would you do? I am about to give up.
-Exhausted by Love

You have a book here, Exhausted, and you should start writing it as a vacation from the corporate. Begin with the facts, 55.5 and looking, the letter from the inmate, and then launch into fiction. Invent an inspirational book for your heroine to read, that says you have to love yourself before you can be loved by another, and put her on that path. Meanwhile, do some self-examination. What is it that truly gives you great pleasure? At 55.5, a person can be so tied up in work and routine that the idea of pleasure is forgotten. The search for pleasure may very well lead you to the man. Mutual pleasure is a good footing for romance. Meanwhile, writing a book in which you’re the heroine will probably tell you a lot about yourself.

 

Mr. Blue,
I write books and have a wonderful medium-size press that puts them out. I like these guys and we laugh and get along grand. The flip side is, I know a bigger press could sell a lot more books. I’m not getting any younger and I’d like to see if I can play in the big leagues before my knees go out and my bat speed drops. Should I risk losing the publisher I like for a larger one that can really sell the tickets? Maybe I’m not really a big leaguer, should I be happy where I am?
-Swinging for the Fences in Texas

You may need a good agent, Swinging, who can lead you through this particular thicket. An agent has an interest in your book sales, but a good agent is also a realist. The beauty of agentry is that you focus on writing and let her deal with business. You sound slightly apologetic, self-effacing, and an agent won’t be shy about beating the drum for you. As for the medium-size friends, they will understand if you jump to the Bigs, and if you sell truckloads of books, they will be happy for you. I can’t advise about risk, it’s a risk to cross the street, but I think your ambition is a fine thing.

 

Hi Mr. Blue,
I am a 66-year-old woman and I married again for the third time (which is a charm). My question is: how do I get my husband to stop asking me, “What did you say?” I now refuse to repeat myself because repeating myself so often feels like work and not worth the effort.
-Speaking into the Void

Diction, Speaking. Project your words. Look at the dear man when you speak to him. If the problem continues, take him to an audiologist. If he won’t go, you can always write notes or text on the phone. If you get frustrated, take his clothes off and throw him in bed. A naked man lying next to a woman is twice as alert.

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The Swedish Academy’s decision to not award the Nobel Prize in Literature this spring hit me hard, of course. I figured this would be my year and was counting on the cash prize of a cool million bucks. A man needs a little boost now and then. I know I do. People associate me with radio but I was also a Novelist — okay? Novels. With characters and dialogue. Lonely guys looking out rain-spattered windows at bare trees and wondering, “Who am I anyway?”

I did some of that last Saturday morning. I am married to a perfectionist, and so my faults are more clear to me than necessary. I am 75 years old, people. How many men of 75 are actively engaged in self-improvement? Are there rehab programs for us? Inspirational books aimed at us? No.

I was looking out a rain-spattered window, thinking long thoughts, when a wild turkey strolled into our backyard and onto the terrace as if he owned the place. My love and I live in the middle of a big city, but on the steep wooded slope behind us, raccoons live, and a fox, and wild turkeys who roost in the trees and grow very large because we’re all liberals around here and nobody has a shotgun to shoot them with.

The turkey stood preening himself ten feet away from me, unconcerned about trespassing, and it made me think about freedom, which I experienced for a few years in my childhood. We lived in the country where a boy could disappear into the woods and run around without adult supervision for most of the day. Believe it or not, we had no pagers or cellphones on us to allow our parents to keep close tabs. Kidnappers could’ve descended and taken us away, bound and gagged, in souped-up roadsters and demanded a ransom of a million in nonconsecutive bills. They didn’t because our parents didn’t have the dough. And my parents had other children. Spares. So we were safe, tearing around shooting cap pistols, waving our cowboy hats, and re-enacting white racist violence against native peoples in a way children would not be allowed to do today. When I see a pickup truck with NRA and Confederate flag bumper stickers on it, I see myself when I was eight. Been there.

And in this moment of reverie, my true love said to me, “You really need to do something about your desk.”

I don’t run a perfectionist desk. Like our president, I believe in the creative power of chaos. I thrive on confusion. And my wife is sort of the Washington Post in my life. I come out with a big pronouncement and she says, “But yesterday you told me —” etc.

Marriage to a perfectionist offers many benefits, don’t get me wrong. The kitchen is tidy, the rugs harmonize with the furniture, tools and other necessities are well organized so you don’t run around looking for toilet paper and find it stashed in the china closet.

On the other hand, there are moments when I realize I’m being observed as I perform some simple task such as pouring water out of a boot — she is watching to make sure I do it correctly. She goes through my wastebasket and extracts tiny recyclable things and shows them to me. She has carried on a long-running campaign to get me to take a daily walk at a brisk pace and thereby live longer so she can go on perfecting me into my eighties and nineties.

What I need at this point is a big burst of self-esteem and so I imagined the phone ringing and a Swede announcing that I — me — yours truly — not Philip Roth, not some unknown Lithuanian poet — had won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

And I would walk into the kitchen where the love of my life is standing by the refrigerator, and she’d say, “You left a full carton of milk sitting out on the counter and I don’t know how long it’s been sitting here, do you?” And I’d say, “We’re going to Stockholm this fall. We’ll fly first class. We need to buy some dress-up clothes. I won the Nobel Prize in Literature, Babe.”

This column is a mess and I know it. Very poorly organized. But if I were a Nobel laureate, you’d think it were a work of genius. You wouldn’t think, “Should that be ‘were’ or should it be ‘was?’” You’d think, “He won the Nobel, it must be ‘were.’” And so it is.

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Live from Town Hall in New York it’s singer-songwriter Justin Townes Earle, vocalist Heather Masse, pianist Rob Fisher, and a bevy of stage and screen actors, including Kristin Chenoweth, Debra Monk, David Garrison, and Kate Beahen. Our regulars Fred Newman, Tim Russell, Sue Scott, and The Guy’s All-Star Shoe Band join as well.

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