Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 74

It’s spring in Minnesota finally. My lawn is greenish, birds sing in the morning, we go walking in a sweater, no gloves. There is still ice on the lakes, but if you don’t look at them, you don’t notice. Life is good. This is not pointed out often enough, the goodness of life, because journalists know that Pulitzer Prizes are awarded for exposing corruption and sending the mayor to jail for skimming money off the School Milk Fund so the kiddos get 2% rather than whole milk, it’s not given for writing about a walk in the park on a sunny day. Nonetheless, we do have parks and the sun does shine.

Yes, the E. coli contamination of romaine lettuce is of concern, but I’ve simply substituted caramel sundaes for salads and feel fine. The odd geyser activity at Yellowstone makes us wonder about the enormous active volcano sitting under the park and waiting to explode, one more reason not to move to Wyoming or Montana. Ditto the news about deadly caterpillars of the asp variety that, if one dropped out of a tree and landed on you, your walk in the park might wind up to be your last. Not a problem for us in northern states.

Gratitude, my dears, is a worthy subject for a columnist. Gratitude that you and I didn’t have to sit through that White House Correspondents’ Dinner and hear that ugly broad with the bad hair tell jokes that were funny in the same way food poisoning is funny. Grateful that we don’t work for TSA and spend eight hours a day telling people to take their laptops out of their bags. Grateful not to have been a fan of the Cosby show.

I am a grateful man. It helps to be old. When I was your age, I was full of anguish, thinking that bitterness was a sign of intelligence and sensitivity. Now I know different. I walk into a men’s room and use the urinal and step back and it automatically flushes. This makes me inexplicably happy. I walk around with a box in my pocket the size of half a slice of bread and it beeps and on the screen is a message from my daughter, “I love you, Daddy. You’re the best.” We didn’t have this back in the Sixties. Instead, there was anger and unrest, people marching with posters. Nobody back then walked around with a poster that said, “I love you, Daddy.” We still have posters, if we need them, but we also can love our fathers.

I drive and a woman whom I’m not married to tells me to turn right and continue for a half-mile and so the woman I love doesn’t have to irritate me, we can simply converse about the goodness of life.

People complain about big government but it was B.G. that gave us GPS. It wasn’t the Baptist church or Kiwanis. And the highway and the Internet and blood thinners. I take a blood thinner twice a day and that is why I am less liable to walk into a restaurant and collapse with a transient ischemic attack and fall onto your table and send your glass of Pinot Noir and platter of steamed mussels crashing to the floor, for which (though you’re not aware of it) you are very grateful. I weigh 230 pounds. If I crash, I create collateral damage. A tiny pink pill much reduces the likelihood.

Medicine in my childhood was very crude; you went to the doctor and he reached for the leeches. There were not many good doctors then because it took seven years to become an M.D. and life expectancy was only 34, and why learn how to make people well when you only have a few remaining years yourself?

It’s a world of progress, and my only complaint is the proliferation of passwords and PIN numbers required now so I keep having to click on Forgot password? And they give me a new one, A1O2q64bz, which I soon forget and have to get another, P381j77rt. Someday a password will be required to use a urinal, but until then, life is good. Stay off the lettuce, avoid Wyoming, don’t walk under trees, and if you’re invited to a big black-tie dinner in a ballroom in a Washington hotel, simply don’t go. Stay home and Google the words “Praise the Lord and forget not all His benefits” and you’ll get Psalm 103. Read it and feel better.

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Dear Mr. Blue,
I’m a single 51-year-old who’s been enjoying the outdoorsy life in Denver for the past fifteen years. I have a nice condo, good friends, a great job in the tech industry. Up until a month ago I thought I had the ideal life—and then my lover of eight years left me for another woman. He said he’d met her through friends and that they’d “clicked” in some magical way he’d never felt before. After he told me, he still slept at my condo that night (albeit in the guest room), and then he was gone the next morning.
I feel like absolute shit. How could I have been so stupid to invest my forties in this man? Looking back, I can see some red flags that I should have paid attention to: we never travelled together, we had no mutual friends, he never introduced me to his two grown children in California. I’m a highly-educated professional woman but this sudden breakup, and my lack of foresight, has me feeling like I’m 13 years old. How do I piece my life back together?
Immature Ph.D 

Dear Immature,

When in shock, take short views. Think about today and tonight, and maybe tomorrow, and don’t try to look down the road. First of all, this man was not the source of your happiness, you were, and you will be again, you and your spirit and your guiding angels. So expel this man. Destroy whatever stuff he left behind, erase his emails, burn his letters, burn the pillowcase from his side of the bed, boil the sheets and towels, destroy whatever coffee cup you associate with him. Try fasting for a day or two, no meat, no sweets, while making plans for a celebratory feast with friends in the near future. Cut yourself off from alcohol as much as possible. And make yourself pray for freedom from memory, from longing, from sorrow. Take it as it comes, take it slowly. Get your sleep, a simple crucial thing. A person often emerges from sleep with keen insights that might not otherwise come. Among your circle of friends, you’ll know which one or two can be helpful to you: trust them and don’t burden the others. If, in six months, you don’t feel yourself moving forward, you might think about seeking professional help, but I’d try this first.

 

Dear Mr. Blue,
I have been single most of my life out of preference and a lack of interest in most people who are interested in me. Periodically, though, I’ll use online dating services or apps to get out there and meet new people. A few months ago, I met a guy on Match.com and was pleasantly surprised that he was interesting, polite, sensitive, and extremely handsome in person. We started seeing each other casually—once a week or less. We have great chemistry together, but the way he speaks to me via text routinely disturbs me. He has made semi-lewd comments about my friends, made belittling “jokes” about my work, and then said stuff like “you know I’m a good guy” when I’ve expressed my concern about those things. (Side note: I don’t appreciate being told what I know or feel.)
It’s weird because in all other communications, he’s respectful. He never acts like I owe him anything, which is refreshing as I’ve mostly dated rather needy men in the past. But I can’t get over my knee-jerk reactions to the way he uses his words—I’m an English major and a big believer in the way that your words subconsciously reveal your true feelings. So…is he right that I’m overreacting, or am I right that there’s something “off” about this guy that he can’t explain away by saying I’m misunderstanding his intentions?
-Apparently Crazy

Dear Apparently,

Don’t text with him. Put up a message: “Sorry, I’m offline. Send a VM instead.” Don’t discuss with him whether he’s “off” or not. Too complicated, too tedious, too absurd. If he bothers you, throw him back in the pool and enjoy your solitude.

 

Dear Mr. Blue,
I have a very demanding job that includes daily stress related to somewhat difficult personalities and high-level execs. I do my best to make everyone happy while getting my work done, and overall I love it, but I need some rest & relaxation when I get home to help balance it out. My husband, in the meantime, has a less stressful job and usually gets home hours before I do. Yet, when I come home around 7pm, he is often waiting at the kitchen table for a dinner that he expects me to make! What is this, the 1950s?! Why isn’t my husband taking initiative here? Do I really need to ask him to do something so obvious?
This isn’t a huge deal, but it’s been getting on my nerves more and more as my job has become more stressful of late. How can I address this matter sensitively? (Or do I even need to be sensitive about it?)
-Tired and Hungry

 Dear Tired,

Go to the store and buy a couple dozen frozen dinners, edible ones, and some frozen pizzas. Buy simple salad makings. Text him when you’re ready to head home: “Darling, could you please make dinner for us tonight from the freezer. Make a salad too if you’d like. Or order take-out. Thanks.” The key to this is the “Thanks.” That’s the magic word that makes the world turn.

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Finally we see some spring in Minnesota, temperatures edging into the 50s, maybe 60s, snow gone except in the crevices, green grass, the miracle of going outdoors in shirtsleeves. It’s like the Rapture except that everyone gets to enjoy it, not just the select few. We who were brought up not to complain have been moaning for a month, and we feel bad about that and intend to atone for it by being good to people who have not been nice to us, if we can think of any.

James Comey has come and gone, an example of the danger of oversell. After seeing him everywhere all the time for a week, there was little need to buy his book. I own a bookstore and it only sold 24 copies: people had already heard six times what he had to say. As the gentleman knows, he did at least as much as the Russians did to elect No. 45, and he certainly has a right to try to make amends, but when he told The New Yorker at length about the “emptiness” of the man — good Lord, when did FBI directors acquire X-ray vision? Leave emptiness to the Buddhists.

This, you understand, is coming from a cranky old liberal who is tired of hearing about the #real and prefers to talk about the #imaginary. I go to dinner with Democrats and when I hear somebody say, “I can’t believe the way T—” I am out of my seat the moment their tongue hits the back of their teeth to make the T. There are plenty of smart people who are paid to talk about him and to say new and interesting things and I wish them well. But not at the dinner table, please.

But the other day, waiting in line to catch a plane to New York, a woman asked me if, when I look around at Democrats, do I see anybody I like as a candidate for president in 2020. I said, “Not yet. But I hope she shows up by the end of the year.”

No more Secretaries of State, please. It’s not a good preparation for politics. It’s a job that requires you to sit for hours listening to ceremonial speeches and so you lose your ear for English. Secretary Clinton needed to go after her opponent as a Russian patsy, a tax cheat and deadbeat, a draft dodger, and a man who never washed clothes or pushed a grocery cart or attempted parallel parking. Instead, she ran for president of the League of Women Voters.

The next Democratic candidate should be a Big Ten grad who played defense on the women’s hockey team, became a DA and put some CEOs in prison, is a liberal but hunts pheasants, has a husky voice, quotes Scripture, and knows how to put someone in his place in fewer than 25 words. Good-looking husband who keeps his mouth shut and a couple charming children. And she’ll have some interesting inconsistencies about her, such as one or two ideas that are just plain nuts. It’s a great way to get attention and it humanizes a candidate to put forward some utter hogwash. A sensible logical woman candidate only reminds men of their wives, and not in a good way.

So I think she should make a big issue of illegal Canadian immigration. The northern border is 4,000 miles long, twice the length of the Mexican border, and it is porous: in many places, you can walk across it and not even know it. A wall is the answer, and it needs to be built soon. It would run through Lake Superior, which has an average depth of 500 feet and so that segment of the wall will be the Eighth Wonder of the World. It will need to be a high wall so that Canadians can’t simply build catapults to hurl themselves over it.

The Canadian threat is more serious than the Mexican because they speak pretty good English and to detect them you have to maneuver them into saying “about/aboot” or “shout/shoot” to pick up the accent. How many Canadians are here illegally — we can only guess — let’s say, 75 million. They came here to escape winter and socialized medicine. They’re taking our jobs. And do they pay taxes? I don’t think so. A 400-foot wall 4,000 miles long is the answer to everything. If you are a smart Democratic woman politician, get in touch: I’ll write your wall paper.

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Dear Mr. Blue,
I can’t get over my ex. We dated a few years ago and when we broke up, even though it was mutual, I was devastated. At 22 years old, it was my first time being in love, and my first time being heartbroken. The relationship itself had been turbulent: he was a night owl and an alcoholic while I found solace in routine and generally healthy habits—except for the part where I would drop everything to be with him, at any time. Still, we found common ground in our worldviews, artistic sensibilities, and appreciation for the finer things in life, such as good food and luxurious hours spent in bed. He was very sweet and attentive when he wasn’t arguing with me about how long to stay at the bar. We started dating again about a year later, magnetically drawn to one another once again despite my better instincts, but I eventually dumped him over our conflicting lifestyles.
When I’m with him I can’t stop obsessing over the doomed nature of our relationship, and yet when we’re apart I find myself wondering if I missed out on The One, since I’ve never felt as intensely about anyone else. How can I move on?
-Obsessed

Dear Obsessed,

When you say “alcoholic,” a deep dark bell tolls, and the word “turbulent” can mean so many things. People use “alcoholic” in a dozen different shades but you know what you mean, and if you’re saying that he was out of control at times, bound on a destructive path, then there’s no place for you here. The drowning man has to be rescued by others. Dive into routine, a life that doesn’t include him, and fall back on your true friends. Breaking up can be devastating but staying with a destructive person can be worse. Move on by assigning yourself good tasks, setting new goals, filling up your days with what your better instincts lead you toward. Enjoy being alone in crowds. Walk two miles a day. Confide in your confidantes. Don’t respond to his emails and don’t answer his calls.

 

Dear Mr. Blue,
An etiquette question for you: I am a musician and I was recently asked to play a show by a fellow jazz group. They have been asking me for a few years to come to their shows, and I never do (I don’t go out much besides when I’m playing), but I figured I could at least play this one show with them.
They started a group text message to organize load-in, etc., and asked me in a roundabout way if I could bring my equipment (trap kit and bass amplifier) for all three acts to share. Generally, I believe that the show organizer should be the one to offer their own equipment if there will be any back-lining going on. I feel that I’m already doing a favor by playing the show in the first place–probably for little to no pay–and now I’m expected to provide my gear not only for myself but also for other people (some of them complete strangers) to use on stage? Was that indeed a rude request by the other musician, or am I wrong to feel taken for granted?
-Slightly Slighted

Dear Slightly,

“Slightly” is the operative word here. You agreed to play the gig so go ahead and do it, with your gear, and have a good time, and if you still feel bad about the deal afterwards, then resolve not to do favors in the future. Or decide to become a writer like me. No writer asks to borrow the laptop of another writer or to come over and print on his printer. It just doesn’t happen. Sometimes pencils are borrowed and not returned, sometimes people ask to steal some of your paper, but nothing big.

 

Dear Mr. Blue,
I’ve been dating this guy for two years and I no longer feel the “spark.” I can’t think of a particular reason why, either. We don’t even hang out very much—probably twice a week—but lately even that feels like a chore. We are exclusive and committed and do things like house-sit for each other when one of us is out of town, show up at each other’s work functions, cook meals together…but there’s something missing in the romance department. I’m 30 years old and he’s 32, and neither of us is thinking about marriage. But neither of us is unhappy enough to leave this stalled relationship.
Whenever I bring up my waning desire to my friends, they make me feel guilty by reminding me that he’s “such a good guy.” And I don’t usually date good guys, so I’m loath to give this one up. But does being with a “good guy” have to mean being bored?
-Guilty Conscience

Dear Guilty,

Romances ebb and flow, temperatures rise and fall, and maybe you need to test this one by not being so committed. Take a break. Stop thinking about what’s missing and go out and find people you enjoy being with. Don’t sit down and have a discussion about what’s wrong — that can be a miserable swamp —- better to take a break and give him a chance to think about it. It shouldn’t feel like a chore to see the guy twice a week. Bad sign. Don’t let your friends push you around. Don’t let him bore you. Find people you love to be with.

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A yuge blizzard descended on Minnesota over the weekend and all of our people who went south for the winter got back home in time to experience it. It was truly yuge, a fabulous blizzard and the snow was up to the housetops and the highway patrol said, “Stay in your homes. Do not drive on account of rabid wolves and jackals running loose.” But some of us went out anyway because that’s how we are. America was not settled by the timid.

April 15th is a little late for a blizzard and so there was some bitter complaining but I just strapped on my skis and went out in the storm and yes, there were jackals, but you run into these guys and you just have to deal with them.

I like the sense of timelessness of a blizzard. You think, this is like #ValleyForge, it’s like the #OregonTrail, like #TheRealWestwardExpansion, not that I want to go back to an older time — I don’t — it’s simply a chance to make a fresh start, to reboot.

America is about progress. For school lunch, we used to have chow mein, and now they have pad thai and kung pao chicken, much better. This little phone/camera/newsstand/encyclopedia the size of a pack of cigars that I carry around with me is a godsend. If I forget where I am, I click on the Map icon and it shows me. If I forget the name of the actor who starred in “Gunsmoke,” I simply Google “Gunsmoke” and the word “marshal” and there it is, Bob Dylan. Or I can Google my name and the word “obituary,” and if there isn’t one, I feel sort of reassured.

Words like “totally” and “awesome” are terrific additions to the language. We had the word “awesome” before but we never used it, we associated “awe” with, for example, the sudden appearance of an angel in the room. We didn’t know that somebody’s hair could be awesome, or their family, or their golf course and resort complex.

This blizzard is awesome. A world of dazzling whiteness all around — it’s like what we expected the Rapture to look like, back when this was a Christian nation. The number of Americans who call themselves Christian is in decline, and that includes a lot of hypocrites or fake Christians — the number of those who actually love God with, if not their whole hearts, at least most of their hearts, is a great deal less. This is the fault of Obama and Obamacare.

But now we have a totally Christian president, an awesome and amazing man, a very good man, who has done more for the faith in the past fourteen months than all of the other forty-four presidents combined, and who, as a result, has suffered more attacks from slimeballs than anybody but has stayed the course and done the right thing, no collusion with the devil at all, no collusion, none, it’s a witch hunt and which hunters those are I think you know — crooked Democrats. Everybody knows it. Everybody.

He gets no credit for what he’s accomplished. Before he came to office, there was no Twitter, no borders, no terrifically smart missiles. He made cable TV what it is today, the greatest in the world, he made us proud again. Under Obama, Christians couldn’t worship openly and you couldn’t carry a gun except in parts of Texas and Oklahoma. America was laughed at by our enemies, the Germans laughed, the Japanese, the French mocked us, laughing through their noses, “fnh fnh fnh,” the way they do. He inherited a pitiful weak military and he made it tough again.

He is a great man and the FBI’s attack on him is an attack on the country and all that we stand for and this blizzard is a sign from heaven: it says, “Global warming? Fnh! Fnh! Fnh!” and it says, “Leave this great white man alone. His business is snow business of yours. What was the FBI looking for? Snow cohens?” You want to see Stormy, we’ll show you stormy. Does this man look like he’d pay women to do the things they say he paid them to do and then pay them not to talk about it? They’re making a mountain out of molehills and putting a pea under the mattress. When you’re a nation like ours, you need a guy like him.

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There is a long aisle at our grocery store with soda pop at one end and tea and coffee at the other, which my love and I get to after the butter and eggs and 2% milk. We come to the beverage aisle and she selects the coffee, dark ground, with names like Swan Lake and Machiavelli. I notice the can of Maxwell House percolator grind and think of Mother and Dad. And there between the coffee and the soda pop is an extensive collection of waters.

In St. Paul, where we live, water comes out of the tap. You pay for it, of course, but the price per serving is miniscule compared to the serious money you shell out for fruit-flavored water, sparkling, caffeinated, antioxidant, and even hydrogenated. One water, enhanced with green tea and ginger, promises to create thermogenesis to increase metabolism and burn body fat.

It’s interesting to walk through an enormous grocery store on the evening of a day when I’ve been reading about the end of World War II, when most of the world except for America was badly damaged and people in Europe and Asia were hungry, many on the verge of starvation. People were eating rodents, crows, dogs, scavenging in the ruins for edible garbage. If you wanted good food, you had to pawn the silverware and go to a black market. This happened within the lifetime of some of us.

No wonder my parents in 1947 bought themselves an acre of land and built a house on it, keeping half an acre for garden, and every summer, we went through a frenzy of canning to fill the basement shelves with jars of corn, peas, beans, tomatoes, squash, and jams and jellies. Six children under their roof and we never went hungry.

My generation, which came of age in the 1950s, was the beginning of teenagerness: we adopted our own mode of dress, our own music, our standard of coolness, which was based on alienation from the previous generation. Adolescence, as we defined it, would not have been tolerated in a time of hardship and scarcity, but we reveled in self-consciousness. Some of us maintained immaturity right up to retirement. We called it The Arts but really it was adolescence.

And now we discover that old age is utterly anonymous. Past 70, we’re all marching into the swamp and it’s the same swamp for everyone. Bombs are falling around us, friends are struck down, eventually we will be, too. We live day to day, the huddled masses of the aged and infirm, watching our successors march on ahead.

What bothers me is that we’re cutting music and drama in the public schools to pay for Gramma to get an MRI if she has a headache and pay for Viagra at $10 per pill to give men in nursing homes to keep them from rolling out of bed at night. Why? Because we old-timers vote and children don’t.

The old need to look after the young and honor the future. I run into people who retired on lovely pensions at 62 and now enjoy making bad art and writing stuff nobody wants to read, an enormous bulge of aging boomers squeezing through the pension pipeline, their expensive health care paid for by semi-literate 30-year-olds penalized by lousy schools where languages were dropped and tests dumbed down and class size rose past 30 and 35, who are now forced to support a growing population of seashell collectors and bad poets and people making videos of the Grand Canyon. After 27 years as Assistant Vice President for Institutional Advancement at the Associated Federation of Organizations, you now get to be a teenager again.

That is what I think of as I look at the $6 can of hydrogenated citrus-flavored organic zero-calorie caffeinated water guaranteed to whip up your metabolism and make you skinny and youthful again. And so I don’t buy it. I go home and, out of solidarity with my ancestors who endured hardship of many kinds, I put a glass under the tap and fill it with water. No ice, no lemon, no sparkle. When you can appreciate a glass of pure water, you’ve touched base with reality. You are back in 1950, on Grandma’s back step, pushing the pump handle down, holding your tin cup under the spout. The chickens cluster around for their share and the barn cats. Some places in the world know terrible drought, but not us. Praise God for His grace and goodness.

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I’ve been reading a fine book for Holy Week, Short Stories By Jesus, by Amy-Jill Levine, about the parables in the Gospels, and thought how much better Sunday School would’ve been had it been taught by a Jewish scholar rather than the rigid joyless fundamentalists of my youth. Jesus was Jewish, He wasn’t a Protestant, for God’s sake. Levine covers the whole string of them, the runaway boy, the tardy workers, the kindly alien, the good CPA, the mustard seed, the rich man and Lazarus, and respects the mysteries they represent.

This is a difference between Jews and my people. My people weren’t interested in the stories, only the morals; they skipped the details and went straight to the conclusions. Oy, vey. And now the worst of them are reforming the faith around the personality of the emperor. Oy, double vey.

It all begins, as Jesus said, with the commandment to love the Lord God with all your heart and all your soul and to love your neighbor as yourself. As I read this, I was in seat 10D and my neighbor in 10E was leaning against me, her head on my shoulder, my daughter, who, in a sense, is myself, and so it’s hard not to obey the commandment. Back home, we live next to two condominium buildings, a multitude of neighbors, most of whom I don’t know, though we try to keep our section of sidewalk plowed in winter and we are understanding about each other’s trees that cross property lines.

Jesus is not joking when He delivers this impossible command, but nonetheless it is religiously ignored by most Christians, including me.

When I was 17, I thought the first part of the commandment told me to join a Trappist monastery and the second part told me to be a communist, and the onset of puberty — which, for us fundamentalists, came around the age of 24 — settled the first and reading a little about Leninism took care of the second, and so I was left to my own devices, loving God by listening to Mahler and reading poetry, and being mannerly to neighbors, and that’s where I am today.

My neighbor in 10E was asleep, and our heads were touching, and I tried to absorb the thoughts in her head so I could love her more fully. She worries about me; I am 55 years older than she, and she protests when I refer to myself as her old dad. “You’re not old, you’re the best dad there is,” she cries, as if saying it makes it so.

I have not been good about passing the teachings of the Lord on to her, my grievous fault, due to my resistance to the damp airless religion of my youth, but nonetheless my fault. This fault is unbearable and so I’ve accepted the idea that all of us sinners will be accepted into God’s presence eventually. It’s a natural belief for a person in the field of comedy to hold. Comedy is about surprise and contradiction and irony. And heaven will be an amazement. The last shall be first. This is a comical idea.

It’s utterly simple to make a crowd feel bad, anyone can do it, but when they laugh, you feel the grace of God at work.

Rabbi Amy gives us the miracle of the feeding of the multitude as Jesus’s joke on his disciples who were worried about credit cards and whether the deli was still open, and Jesus told them to keep passing the platters of loaves and fishes and they did and the food never ran out.

At the end, the disciples ran away from the Crucifixion. It was just too much. I run away too. Someday I hope to understand. I don’t yet. The loaves and fishes is easier. So I’m not a real Christian. So shoot me. You do and I expect to rise again. The saints and martyrs will be there and also Mabel and Gertrude and Fern, our grade school cooks who fed the poor, and also the monks who were boiled alive by the cannibals but they didn’t taste good because they were friars, and of course Jesus, who hung on the cross and cried out to Peter who said, “Yes, Lord?” And Jesus said, “Peter, I can see my house from here.”

As indeed He could. And so can we. And if you get there before I do, tell all my friends that I’m coming, too.

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Late March is a time of rare unanimity here on the northern tundra when everyone — socialists, monarchists, anarchists, humble peasants, mighty tycoons — is ready for the snow to melt and green grass to appear and a warm breeze blow through the open window, which is unlikely to happen anytime soon and so we must live with the fact that the world is beyond our control.

The president must have felt that way Sunday night: the leader of the Free World and yet he was powerless to prevent a woman from going on “60 Minutes” and talking about having sex with him in 2006 at Lake Tahoe though she wasn’t attracted to him but thought he might put her on his TV show.

On the other hand, you can go on YouTube and see video footage from security cameras at Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas that shows how utterly simple and ordinary it is to haul carts of luggage containing assault rifles and ammunition up to your suite on the 32nd floor and use them to kill 58 people and injure 851 in a crowd of concertgoers a couple nights later. I’m sure the shooter felt fully in control the whole time, including the moment he shot himself.

My daughter marched on Saturday with thousands of young people, in favor of controls on the sale of deadly weapons. I grew up in an era when the word “school” and the word “shooting” were alien to each other, and that is no longer true.  Every child in America has had to practice a school lockdown.

And Sunday night, I skipped “60 Minutes” in favor of supper with family and hearing a college sophomore talk about school, how he enjoys reading John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and studying French and looking forward to his semester abroad in Cameroon. This is the real story, not infidelity or mass shootings, but ambition: the urge, no matter the season, to venture forth and experience the world and gain some useful understanding.

I’m engaged in some of that myself. A young cousin of mine told me that she wishes she knew more about our family’s history and so that is now my assignment. I earned my living writing fiction but apparently it is the truth she wants and how does one find it in a family that was so good at keeping secrets?

Our colonial ancestors who were loyal to the Crown and fled to Canada when the Revolution broke out — I don’t find letters from them laying out their principles; they simply packed up their goods and left before they could be lynched. My great-great-grandfather David Powell who left his wife and sons in Illinois in 1859 and went off to the silver rush in Colorado for four years — was he, in fact, running away from the Civil War? We have no record of any of our people fighting for the Union. Our grandfather was born in New Brunswick and came to Minnesota to help out his sister whose husband was dying of TB: he was a man of great probity, a devoted Christian, an elder in the church, and yet we have word from a contemporary of his that Grandpa was “quite the hellraiser” in his youth. What do we not know and do we want to find it out? There are several cases of marriages that, though done in a rush, did not precede the birth of the first child by the proper length of time. There is a lonely grave in the family cemetery of a cousin who died of a botched abortion by a physician who had done prison time for treating the fugitive John Dillinger in 1934. She lived near my parents for a couple years and was a friend of my mother’s. We do not know her story and we wish we did.

As for me, I did my best to die young but survived and now, looking back, I find that my miserable youth is a dim memory, but I clearly recall several sterling plays I made on a ballfield, and the day I married my wife on 99th & Amsterdam in New York and walked to our wedding dinner on 86th, and the brilliant day I turned 70 aboard a ship in the middle of the Atlantic.  Maybe it’s true that the light dispels the darkness.  Spring will be here before you know it. It is likely to come suddenly. Prepare to be enlightened.

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Now that the 17th is behind us, the pipes have stopped calling from glen to glen, Danny is gone until next March when the valley is white with snow, I look at my calendar and don’t see much to get excited about. Easter is two weeks away and what with church membership in decline, the day is more about jellybeans and less about the Resurrection of Our Lord. And ladies don’t wear big hats as they used to do. Memorial Day is just a long weekend and if anyone treks to a military cemetery to hear a speech honoring the sacrifices of good men, they will find themselves in a very small crowd, and that is depressing. The Glorious Fourth is a fine old tradition wherever people make the effort to maintain it, but the fireworks part is easier than the parade and the declamatory part is almost extinct. Labor Day is a big zero. Halloween used to be enjoyable but a lot of the fun has gone out of spookiness now with a demented person in the White House.

I wish we had another holiday in the fall, what with Columbus Day having fallen into disfavor due to his enthusiasm for enslaving other people and I think it should be October 14, two days later, which is Dwight D. Eisenhower’s birthday.

Eisenhower Day will be a day on which smart people can admit to their dumb mistakes. Ike was a great man about whom most intellectuals of his day were dead wrong, as two new biographies of him have set out to show. And I will take my place in a line of Democrats who can say so. I was only ten in 1952 when he was elected president but I well remember how cool it was to look down on him. That was when I discovered the meaning of “cool” — it meant unEisenhowerlike.

A whole class of very hip people mistook the pretensions of Adlai Stevenson for intellectual acuity and the plain talk of Ike for mediocrity. Comedians, poets, old lefties: they were wrong. I was one of them. My parents liked Ike so I was madly for Adlai. My naiveté diminished somewhat with age, but it’s instructive to face the truth. Also, one realizes how far the Republican Party has fallen, from the general who planned D-Day and managed the Allies to victory in Europe to the current braggart and buffoon, but that’s a lesson for another time.

It’s good to live long enough to be able to look back and see where you went wrong, not that it’ll improve your record in the future, but at least you’ll know enough to tone down the righteousness. People I know got very intense about reforming public education years ago and the words “open” and “alternative” were magical charms and now we begin to appreciate some of the benefits of the old repressive system in which children sat in rows of desks rather than around tables. I had a teacher who imposed harsh penalties for grammatical mistakes and though her and me didn’t always get along so good, I did learn from her.

I’ve been wrong often enough that I hesitate to join those who want to take Columbus’s statue down in Columbus Circle in New York, as a city commission has recommended. Also the statue of Teddy Roosevelt in front of the Museum of Natural History on the grounds that, late in his career, after creating national parks, reforming Civil Service, signing the Pure Food and Drug Act, conserving wilderness, busting monopolies, he embraced ideas about eugenics that were embraced by German fascists after Roosevelt’s time.

If you remove Columbus, then what shall we do with Columbia University? Rename it Upper West Side University? And Columbus, Ohio, and the Columbia Broadcasting System?

Columbus’s statue is on a column so high it’s hard to recognize it as Columbus, but if it’s a problem, you could simply behead him and put Eisenhower’s head on him. Same with Roosevelt.

In Minnesota, we are changing the name of Lake Calhoun, named for the slaver John C. Calhoun, to Bde Maka Ska, or “White Earth” in the Dakota language. Our way of correcting the record 150 years late. If, however, you live next to the lake and are calling 911 to say your house is on fire, you might want to use the old racist name, at least for the next fifty years or so until all the old firemen have retired.

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Stormy Daniels is going to tell her story and if it is true that she whispered in her lover’s ear to meet with Kim Jong-un and talk about denuclearization and if steel tariffs were also part of the discussion, it’ll be news for a week and then something else will come along and she will be forgotten.

There is way too much information out there. It is filling our heads with sawdust and getting in the way of our direct experience of the world. For example, the fresh snow in my front yard, the birch trees, the bright winter sky, like so many bright winter skies going back to when I waited for a school bus under one when I was 13. On my front step is this morning’s paper and if I pick up the paper and open it, the school bus disappears. Either I can read about Stormy or I can see this day for all that it contains.

The past is still present all around us and the news does not prove otherwise. I wouldn’t have said that when I was young and scuffling for attention, but now I live on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi and the interstate and watch the daily struggle for prominence, the horns honking, the fists shaking, the Lexuses and Audis competing for an inside lane from which to ace out the Chevys and arrive at their reserved parking spaces three minutes earlier. I sit up here like a marsupial in a persimmon tree, observing the male elk bashing each other bloody, and I glance at the paper where President Nebuchadnezzar says once more that he is a genius, and then move on to what’s real: our family and friends, the ambitious young, the elders sliding with dignity into oblivion.

I went to my friend Leon’s art show Saturday and was stunned by his extravagant genius. I only know him from having had lunch with him regularly; he doesn’t bring paintings to lunch. My people are Yorkshiremen and lowland Scots; his are Ukrainian. If my people took brush and paint in hand, we would paint walls, whereas he and his people paint horses, curtains and windows, the faces and forms of beautiful women, lush plumage and vegetation. Some of the work contains glitter. My people would never put glitter on anything; they’d remove any glitter already there. What’s my point? It’s that our lunches are about news and meanwhile he’s made his life into art and with art, the past lives on into the present.

I’ve been making notes for a memoir and discover oddly that my clearest memories are of beloved teachers and relatives, lucky accidents, wonderful trips, magical places. The gloomy periods of self-pity tend to vanish, the breakups and defeats, the manuscript lost in the Portland train station, the easy pop flies I dropped, the stories rejected. I spent two years once on a novel that nobody liked except me and now I can’t even tell you what it was about but I can close my eyes and relive a hard-hit ground ball down the third-base line that I caught on the first bounce backhanded, braced my right foot, and threw to first, nailing my uncle Don by two steps. I was 14.

Life is a comedy. I wasn’t brought up to think so but it now seems evident by what is remembered, what has disappeared. Watergate is dead matter, a dim mist of images and transcripts that only a dozen historians care about, whereas the musicians in my backyard on a summer night in 1973 are very clear, sitting in a gazebo, fiddles, guitars, mandolins, a concertina, a cardboard box for a drum, someone blowing on a beer bottle. The sun went down, we lit a fire, children who are now middle-aged parents roasted wieners and marshmallows, and the music played on and on, old tunes that if you didn’t know them were easily picked up. And after enough beers, we put down the instruments and sang Beach Boys songs, Supremes, Shondells, Temptations, Drifters, songs everybody knew the words to—“My Girl,” “I Think We’re Alone Now,” “Save the Last Dance For Me”—and the neighbors came out and stood in their backyards and listened. It’s all still there somehow. Clouds of cigarette smoke in the air. We were venturing into our 30s, our prospects uncertain, singing “Baby, don’t you know I love you so, can’t you feel it when we touch,” and I hear it still.

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