Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 8

I know something about elitism, having grown up in the exclusive Sanctified Brethren — we refused to commune with 99.85% of Christendom, we looked down on Baptists, Anglicans, you name it, we found fault with them all, and if a Lutheran guy made off with one of our young women, we forced ourselves to attend the wedding though it was actually a funeral. And then I got a job in public radio where I got to see elitism from below. I was a mere entertainer in the midst of serious journalists and scholars, and I was seriously looked down upon by many people whom income from my show was supporting. But then parents of teenagers have gone through the same thing and survived and I did too.

I sort of regret that I didn’t become truly elite when Minnesota almost became part of New France, this territory having been “discovered” by French explorers, and France battled the English for dominance here but then Louis XV was more interested in sugar from the Caribbean than fur from the North and so he withdrew and Voltaire said, “All we lost was a few acres of snow.” This remark still stings, centuries later. We could’ve grown up speaking French and saying “Joie de vivre” with real élan and “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” and “C’est la vie” instead of saying “Well, that’s life,” which doesn’t have anything like the savoir faire of “C’est la vie.” And with “C’est la vie,” you don’t need to stick the “well” in front of it to sound casual.

French is an elegant language and we envy it, and if a fellow American tosses off a French phrase such as “S’il vous plaît,” we see him as an elitist and take it as a cue to drop our own pretensions and admit that we don’t like boeuf bourguignon nearly so much as we like meatloaf, that a French label does not make the wine superior.

What brings this to mind is the new movie, “A Complete Unknown,” which gives Bob Dylan fans the chance to be even more fascinated by their own obsession about the man, as a poet, prophet, visionary genius, and the Voice of a Generation, but to me, a Minnesotan of his era, it’s all rather amusing. We knew plenty of male undergraduates in the Sixties who practiced being oblique and self-contradictory and affected mystery. It was a style. There was one at every party in Minneapolis, sometimes two and then one of them had to leave. They wanted to be considered poets, prophets, geniuses, but you need more than ambiguity.

The Prophet Bob didn’t get where he got by being cryptic, he practiced some classic Minnesota virtues such as steady hard work — no writer’s block for Bob — and industrious touring and being on time for gigs and avoiding addictive substances that make you stupid and then dead, and also tolerating jerks, including ones who love you.

He had to work to become iconic — in some of his early recordings he sounds a lot like Ray Benson of Asleep at the Wheel and he had to learn how to sing through his nose so he could be a Bob instead of a Ray and there he is today, a self-invented object of fascination. Minnesotans are not big on fiction though. There probably are people in Hibbing who think, “If Zimmerman had really applied himself, he could’ve become a terrific neurologist.”

As I proceed through my eighties, I go back to a Minnesota point of view: life is complicated, take it one day at a time, the urge to be top dog is not a useful ambition, be grateful for what you have and learn to cherish your portion. As the French would say, “Carpe diem.”

The lust for world domination does not make for the good life. It’s the life of the male raccoon who battles for preeminence and winds up in a ditch being pecked at by crows. It’s not for sensible people. Be at peace, read books, cherish your friends, take walks, love life until the first coronary walks up and slugs you in the chest. Charisma is pure fiction, and so is brilliance. It’s the dummies who sit on the dais, and it’s the smart people who sit in the dark near the exits.

I had to make many mistakes to learn all that and now I’ve saved you the trouble of doing likewise. You’re welcome. God bless.

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Somebody has to be the worst president in U.S. history, they can’t all be No. 14 as Joe Biden was in a survey of American historians or No. 8 like Ike or No. 35 like Nixon, and isn’t it only fair that the worst (No. 45) should be given the opportunity to improve his ranking? Of course it is. Meanwhile, I don’t need to follow his second term day by day; I can better occupy my time with the crossword puzzle and the book reviews and skip the funny pages. I don’t check my IRA every morning or my blood pressure or the WNBA standings or the air quality index, so why should I upset myself at the thought of Kash Patel running the FBI or Tulsi Gabbard as head of national intelligence or an anti-vaxxer as Secretary of Health? If I want to study lunacy, why not become a therapist and get paid for it?

So I am focused on the positive aspects of life. I’ve just succeeded at taking a lazy one-week vacation with my family at a resort in California at which I slept late and hung out beside a pool under an umbrella and sipped lavender lemonade. My work ethic relaxed severely, I was very agreeable the entire time, I even started to sort of like myself.

Once I sat in a hot tub with four people who seemed to be employed in the software trade and listened to their palaver and didn’t understand a single word of it, not even “the” or “a” or “since.” It was very rewarding. None of them asked me what I do for a living so I just sat in bubbling hot water watching the mountains turn pink in the sunset and feeling very lucky not to be influential like Thomas L. Friedman of the Times who returned from a trip to China with a new perspective on world affairs.

Life is good once you master the art of Deletion. Every day my laptop is full of emails asking for money to do worthwhile, even noble, things, which, if I donated to them, I’d soon be living in a cardboard box in a vacant lot, and so I click on “Unsubscribe” and they go away for a while. Instead, I google “What is the prospect of international peace and understanding?” and find that the U.N. thinks it’s inevitable and dalailama.com says it’s based on compassion and foreignpolicy.com thinks the prospects are not good. We didn’t used to have Google, my kiddoes, we used to sit and worry about these things and now at last clear answers are available. Contradictory, but still.

An old man sees progress on so many fronts, such as the advent of the frozen waffle and spreadable butter. I remember the heavy waffle irons of yore, the risk of a small child yanking the contraption down on his head and therefore never getting into grad school, the mixing of dough and prying the roasted waffle off the hot iron and spreading rock-hard butter on it and ripping the delicacy to shreds. Now it’s two minutes from toaster to mouth, no problem.

Advances have been made in packaging: tiny slits enable a person to open a bag of jelly beans or caramel corn without using brute force and perhaps injuring a shoulder and needing shoulder replacement.

As a liberal Democrat, I felt obliged to read about environmental degradation, poor math scores among low-income children, declining respect for governmental institutions, the loss of wildlife species, explosive economic inequity, the advance of AI toward self-replication, nations falling into chaos and refugee populations growing, the fascination of the working class with billionaire leaders who use political power to enrich themselves, and so on and so forth, and now I’ve discovered artificial tears can take the place of reading about crises. A couple squirts in each eye and I feel bad for half a minute and accomplish about as much as I would after reading the Times or the Post.

And so I am avoiding having lunch with Democrats — it’s the same conversation over and over: “Did you read about, etc., etc. I can’t believe it, so on and so forth.” The man will do what he will do. Let John Thune and Mike Johnson agonize over it. I hope he can beat out James Buchanan, ranked as 44th by historians, the man who sat on his hands as the country blundered into the Civil War. It’s a low bar but as long as the South doesn’t delete itself, Trump can do it. And if the South does, well, 39 states is still a lot of states and much more united.

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I flew down to Texas last week to get out of my tiny bubble on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and see that this is a big country that includes people who don’t think as I do nor even wish to. And from Texas I took my family to California to be among people who think as I did when I was younger but with uninhibited extravagance. It was quite a trip.

On Election Day, I expected Wonder Woman to win who fights for justice, peace, and equality, and she did not. It goes against what Miss Mortenson taught us in tenth-grade civics class so I went to Texas to try to make sense of it. Miss Mortenson believed in newspapers that tell the truth, the American ideal of the intrepid reporter who can’t be bought, and when I landed in Houston, I saw we’d arrived in the land of Fox — it was on giant screens in airport waiting areas and cafés — the network that coagulated entertainment and news by telling its audience what they wanted to believe and thanks to the Australian Rupert Murdoch, 70% of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen and Biden was illegitimate, and there is the heart of the illness in this country, the willingness to believe what you know is not true in order to think more of yourself and less of other people.

Texas presents stylistic differences, for sure: no adult Minnesota male would walk down a concourse dressed in a cowboy outfit and no self-respecting waitress would addresses a stranger as Darling but here it comes with the job. You see people enjoying a whiskey highball with breakfast. There’s plenty of plastic surgery. One walks around averting one’s eyes. And I shrink at the sight of young women competing at cuteness, 18-year-olds working hard at being 11 or 12, squealing, yelping, yipping.

I got a car service at the airport and the driver filled me in a little. I asked her, “What would a Democrat need to do to win statewide in Texas?” She said, “Become a Republican.” I asked her if Democrats have any hope. She said, “We did until this year and now we’re just scared. Nobody likes Ted Cruz and still he got reelected. When Texas got hit by a winter storm and the power went out and Houston was in the 30s and Cruz flew to Cancún for a holiday, we were sure we could beat him, but no. When people vote for someone they despise, that’s serious.”

The pool at the hotel had a swim-up bar where you could order a grasshopper or a martini. Looking around I saw bulges on men’s hips where they seemed to be carrying hardware under their jackets, perhaps an electric drill or a hammer. And plastic is everywhere, plastic abounds. No recycling bins in sight.

After a few days we flew to California and a mountain resort that offers birdwatching and pottery-making, self-guided meditation, olive oil tastings, and a spa that offers a flower seed scrub and body polishes and an exfoliating experience with a traditional Chumash narrative. There are artists in residence. Chefs create dishes from local growers. There are “impactful group experiences.” At the restaurant, you can order vegan lasagna with roasted root vegetables or lavender lemonade. Lavender grows on the grounds and roses and many varieties of herbs. The resort has a policy of “wildlife acknowledgement,” meaning “do not approach and do not feed.” There is little plastic in evidence and recycling bins everywhere.

Clearly the country has chosen cowboys and highballs over meditation and the country is about to get an education. Thanks to the highly selective teaching of history, I grew up a patriotic optimist before the era of resentful billionaires. The Fords and the Rockefellers were grateful tycoons and endowed foundations to do good things unlike Elon Musk who paid a quarter-billion for the privilege of advising the incoming president. Back in the days of cursive writing and table manners, this was considered Conflict of Interest.

Some of my best friends are earnest progressive Democrats who are passionate about transgender rights and when I tell the joke about the transgender Christmas tree whose pronouns are tree/trim suddenly I become an enema. But I’m troubled to see corruption in broad daylight accepted as normal. We’ve arrived at an oligarchy more brutal than the one Thomas Keillor fled when he sailed from Yorkshire in colonial times. So onward we go. We are about to get the government that Texas voted for.

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Time magazine naming Trump “Person of the Year” is an interesting idea, sort of like naming a mortician to be your heir, but there it is. Life has its oddities. These days I’m walking around with a chorus of “Halle, Hallelujah” echoing in my head, from a Christmas song, “Light in the Stable,” I sang with some women the other day. I just sang a bass line, which is like inviting a mortician to your birthday party, but it felt good to me and now the refrain will not — simply refuses to — go away. I need my mind. I use it for various things. I can’t donate it to praising a child in a manger. He’s got cathedrals galore, choirs, gigantic organs, Bible classes.

I have just poured some coffee an inch to the left of my coffee cup and I hold the Hallelujah chorus responsible. Poured it on the kitchen table and it spread under the laptop I am writing on. Thank goodness my beloved was not witness to this. She has noted gaps in my thinking, moments of global aphasia (such as the inability to remember exactly what global aphasia is), a fondness for irrelevance, a tendency to repeat myself, and also. Global aphasia.

People who are employed by me notice that I go up and down stairs very deliberately, holding onto the railing — some might say “clutching” it — and I see them scanning the want ads for employment opportunities in the parking-lot attendant field.

I was a parking-lot attendant when I was 19 and 20 and I remember it well, a five-acre University gravel lot on the west bluff of the Mississippi in Minneapolis, about a hundred yards from the bridge the poet John Berryman jumped off to die in the coal yard below. I remember bitter cold mornings, the wind whistling down the valley from Manitoba, and I, lightly dressed in order to be cool, directing cars to the correct spot, lining them up in double rows.

It was the first time in my life I exercised true authority. I encountered the stubborn independence of the intellectual elite and I bent them to my will with the use of precise hand signals, a commanding shout, and turning a deaf ear to their protests. It worked. My parking lot was commended for its straight even rows. I got a certificate of appreciation but I’ve forgotten where I put it.

I remembered those days last week riding in a cab down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, the city packed with shoppers, the street from 72nd down was a glacier of cars. The subway would’ve taken a few minutes, a taxi took an hour. No New Yorker would’ve made this choice, the cabs were full of yahoos like me. Traffic guys with yellow gloves waved at cars jammed in solid.

And then, walking west on 43rd Street to find Town Hall, I remembered when I was in my mid-twenties and submitted stories to The New Yorker magazine, which was just east of Sixth Avenue. Every young writer in America knew the address by heart: 25 West 43rd. In 1969, a Barnard grad named Mary D. Kierstead was in charge of the “slush pile,” the unsolicited submissions, and from this mountain she chose a story of mine and sent it up to an editor and told him to read it and he did and accepted it and ever since I have believed in angels.

With the prestigious name of The New Yorker to drop, I snuck into public radio though I was no journalist and knew nothing about classical music and I launched a Saturday night show completely unfitted for public radio, which lasted forty years and thank you, Lord, for your mercy. It gave me more fun than an old evangelical could expect, hanging around musicians, a very congenial lot, and also earned some money.

Angels perform acts of kindness that turn out to have enormous consequences. I’ve looked at the story she picked off the slush pile and don’t see anything remarkable about it, perhaps she was just having a good day. She died four years ago at the age of 96. I think I met her once at a party at the Angells’, speaking of angels. She was wearing red glasses. Life is beautiful, the precariousness of it. What if she’d called in sick that day and her place was taken by some old grumblebutt has-been named Bob and I’d be a retired parker of cars parked in a rest home, reminiscing about notable blizzards and downpours.

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My wife and I like to sit in the same room at night, doing our separate things, she in a chair reading a book, I at a table addressing Christmas cards. The book is by a mentally ill mountain climber worried that in an avalanche he might lose his meds for bipolarity. It’s a snowy Christmas card, I’m signing our names under a poem that ends “Onward we go, faithfully, into the dark and are there angels hovering overhead? Hark.” She is sleepy but it’s a good book and the bipolar guy is at a Buddhist camp where you meditate ten hours a day and his job is to sweep the floor with a broom made from branches. I’ve done a mountain of cards and I’m still in the K’s, Katherine, Ken, Kristina, and I’m not thinking about angels, I’m thinking what if Elon Musk sells himself the U.S. Postal Service for $125 million, half of what he paid for the Republican Party, and of course it goes online and merges with X and you’ll speak the inscription to be written cursively in your distinctive style. The p.o. is gone and polio and smallpox return and the F.B.I.J. investigates journalists and it all happens without anybody commenting on it and a second-grader calls 911 to report an active shooter in the next classroom of a Christian school.

It’s at times like this I think maybe I should see a neurologist. Then remember I saw Dr. Fink two weeks ago and he said my eyes are focused somewhat apart, not together, and the cardiologist said arrhythmia might be causing the dizziness, and the eyelid guy said he didn’t think surgery would help. He was the first left-handed physician I’ve seen in ages and I was fascinated by it. My handwriting is big and bold, using a black Sharpie, and I write “Blessings!” under the “Hark” to indicate that I mean it, it is a blessing despite the cash flowing into Bezos’s coffers, people crave Christmas. Normal folks, crazy ones, kooks, awake in the night and hear spooks, and look for a light, a star shining bright, a family in the Gospel of Luke’s.

I was in a big crowd a week ago in St. Paul, not in a church, a big crowd of people in off the street and someone started singing Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright, and they all sang. No piano, just a crowd singing. Three verses, the holy Infant, the quaking shepherds, the whole megillah. I’ll bet you most of them hadn’t darkened a pew in years. But in this crazy culture of ours in which your phone blinks and you get the latest details on the school shooting (“President calls incident “unconscionable”) and you google Wisconsin to remind yourself where it is and for some reason Bing Crosby is singing and the fact you know it’s him tells you that you’re Old so you click on Back and here are very nice people lined up to buy McWaffles and become joyful and again Back and Stan and Ollie dressed as cowboys are dancing in each other’s arms. In the midst of all this, plus the return of locker-room talk to government (“absurd,” “stupid,” “worst president in history”), people do long for beauty, for reverence, the sacred. I felt it in that big room in St. Paul. Enough with the catcalls and the spitballs, let’s try bowing our heads and all singing in the same key.

My love was sleepy but she was somewhere in Nepal with the guy climbing Everest without oxygen and I was doing Pamela, Patricia, Peter, writing Blessings! And Blessings!And Blessings! I love this quiet night together, reading and writing. We live in a building that went up the year of the Great Crash. The lobby is grand but plenty of the folks who moved in could barely pay the rent. Some of these cards will go to elderly friends, some in Rehab though how much Rehabbing is possible in your mid-80s, I don’t know. Maybe the dizziness is part of the game, the result of a lifelong aversion to exercise. I chose this life and at the end I must pay the bill: that’s what we puritans believe. I prefer the term “lightheadedness,” a head filled with light. I go to bed next to the woman I love, I scratch her back, I remember that crowd in St. Paul. I feel calm if not too bright.

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I did a Christmas show last week in St. Paul that ended with the audience singing “Silent Night,” three verses, a cappella, the infant tender and mild, the quaking shepherds, the radiant beams, and minutes later who should come backstage but my cousin Phyllis and her family, which made me happy. Her mother was my aunt Jean, who was funny and had a big heart and who, when I was a toddler and Dad went into the Army, took my mother and her three little kids into her big house in St. Paul and I still remember how welcome we were. There was a chair at the table that I guarded and if anyone tried to sit in it, I said “Daddy’s chair” and waved them away.

I go back home now and then and people walk up to me in the Hotel St. Paul who remember me as a friendly radio voice and some of them were apparently quite attached to that voice — I met a young woman last week who gasped as if I were a ghost and said, “We listened to you every Saturday at five o’clock. I still miss you.”

I’d feel that way if I ran into A.J. Liebling; I’d be stunned and tell him how I loved his writing when I was in the eighth grade at Anoka High School, read The Sweet Scienceand The Road Back to Paris, but he’s been dead since 1963.

I miss St. Paul, which is still my home but not because I’m admired there. I love it for the same reason my wife loves New York. She came here from Minnesota as a teenager to study violin and become a musician and so she went through hard times, experienced poverty, stayed true to her vocation and when she got the blues, she found relief by taking long walks around Manhattan. She was proud and never asked for help and that makes Manhattan her true home, the place where she gained independence.

I did my hard times in St. Paul, was broke there, lived for years with no savings or insurance, once had to live in my in-laws’ basement for three months, pure humiliation though Marge and Gene were hugely hospitable. I got fired in St. Paul twice. But I survived and bought my first house on Goodrich Avenue in 1982 for $80,000.

I like living in Manhattan, I love the fact that my wife loves Manhattan, I like being a pedestrian, an invisible nobody. I take my solemn face around the town and experience the here of the here and the there of the there without ever needing to impersonate myself. I go forward for Communion at St. Michael’s and am just one more sheep. I’m a perpetual tourist here because I had money when I came here and never had to struggle. I am in awe of Jenny’s dedication: her beloved grandparents lived in New Jersey, they were well-to-do, she never asked them for help.

The happiest Christmas I remember was the year after we married and we put on a big Christmas Eve dinner for a bunch of her freelance musician friends. We made a feast and they were delighted, it was a long evening of hilarity and loose talk and merriment, and I didn’t know them but I felt honored by their friendship.

And looking back to that marvelous night, I see it was due to their having known poverty. A person will enjoy a feast more if you’ve experienced living on the edge. There is a dullness that comes with the comfortable life. My parents grew up in the Depression and strove to give us a life free from want and now I think I was drawn to the literary life by a craving for danger. I was fired when I was 25 and set out to be a writer and wound up in Marge and Gene’s basement.

And now I worry, as old people do, about the kids I see who are growing up in the dreadful clutter of American life, the gizmos and social media bullying, and can they find delight as I did in skating on the frozen Mississippi and discovering Liebling and Jenny found listening to Prokofiev and Brahms. I pray for our kids to be lighthearted. The darkness is out there, and Christmas becomes utterly beautiful, the circle of love and friendship, the lighted candles, the anticipation of the child, the radiant beams, the redeeming grace.

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I flew back to Minnesota just in time for a classic hard Minnesota freeze like the ones of my childhood, when you walk out the door and the cold hits you like a board and suddenly you realize you’re wearing the wrong clothes. You chose these clothes for elegance to emphasize your slim figure. The right clothes would make you look like you weigh 300 pounds. You wish you had those clothes on now.

St. Paul is bleak. I walk out of the Hotel St. Paul and wait for my Uber ride to the Midway Saloon. I feel I’m at a concentration camp for political dissidents. The wind blows in off the Mississippi. Nobody is out for a walk, nobody is hanging out, everyone is heading briskly for a car or for a warm building. And there is no complaining. This is the remarkable thing. Nobody says, “My God, it’s cold out, I have no feeling in my face,” because (1) this is not a personal experience, everyone else is cold too and (2) God is aware of the cold and is hoping it will make you a better person, which God knows it should. Nobody says, “I wish I were in Florida,” because (1) you are not in Florida and (2) there is a reason for you to be in Minnesota, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. You’d be in Phoenix with all the retired cops and teachers and ministers.

I’m here because my friend Pat Donohue asked me to come do a gig with him at the Midway Saloon and how could I say no? I’m 82, I’m a performer, and thanks to my evangelical upbringing, I’ve never performed in a bar where people drink beer and whiskey. I did a show at a winery once but that’s different. This is a neighborhood bar where everybody seems to know everybody. The pool table is up front, the stage is in the back. I’ve spent a good deal of my life in high-end venues, the ones with ushers and dressing rooms and a stage manager and a Steinway piano and it seems right, at the end of my career, to get back to basics and do two sets on a stage next to the men’s room on a profoundly cold night in St. Paul.

Pat’s a guitarist I’ve known for years and Richard Kriehn plays mandolin and I do a couple songs I remember from childhood, the ballad of the babes in the woods who froze to death in a blizzard and the ballad of Frankie and Johnny, the crowd singing the refrain “He was her man and he was doing her wrong.” It is a very warm crowd, packed in tight in chairs, around tables, standing in the corner, and thanks to the cruel wind outdoors, they are all very happy to be here, which is not always true of an audience in, say, West Palm Beach or Honolulu. The cold has drawn us together as mammals. They know that I used to live here and then moved to New York, but they’re in a forgiving mood because here I am suffering with them. Someone asks if I know Bob Dylan. I don’t. I used to sing his song “Mozambique” but can’t remember the words. I sing a Van Morrison song, “Oh won’t you stay? Stay a while with your own ones. Don’t ever stray. Stray so far from your own ones. For this world is so cold, don’t care nothing for your soul you share with your own ones.”

And in a little bar on a bitterly cold night in St. Paul, I feel the full weight of those words. The crowd was in a singing mood so we did some Everlys, some Beatles, “Honky Tonk Women,” but I felt like singing a gospel song about the river Jordan: “Now look at that cold Jordan, look at the deep waters.”

I was young and unemployed in this town at one time. I had to live in my parents’ basement at one time. I went to several funerals in this town that broke my heart. I sat in dark bedrooms and wrote on a typewriter here with no expectation I’d get published. I got fired here twice. So this is my home. I’m a visitor in New York, always will be. I never had it rough there. I need to come back here and be with my people and sing with them on a really cold night.

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A guy whom we Christians think about every Christmas is John the Baptist, who announced, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord,” but when people came from Jerusalem to hear him preach and to be baptized, he called them a “generation of vipers,” not a welcoming thing to say, and because he wore rags, had a long beard, and fed on locusts, he’s not celebrated at Advent. He was too adventurous. We don’t serve locusts for Christmas dinner, not even in a pie or as seasoning on turkey, so poor John is cast aside, even by Baptists, and we focus instead on shepherds and angels, who are kindly and better dressed.

Seeing how much attention irrelevant elves and snowmen and reindeer get at the holidays, you’d think the mystic who announced the forthcoming miracle could at least get an ornament on a tree, but this is how a consumer society deals with mystics. We want them to have nice hair and speak softly and not eat insects.

Another guy left out is Joe, the dad who traveled afoot while Mary rode the donkey and who surely deserves some credit for the virginity of his betrothed, but no, he’s only a bystander like the sheep and the cattle. I’m not saying he should be worshipped but how about respected?

I was a failure as a mystic and chose comedy instead, which is the opposite of mysticism, and I wasn’t a good father or husband, and I contemplate this on Sunday sitting in my pew, but we Episcos don’t belabor confession, we don’t take cold showers or whip ourselves or sleep on a hard floor, we just say the prayer of contrition and are absolved and then we shake hands with each other and go on to Communion. I like this about Anglicanism, the briskness. Don’t devote yourself to remorse. Repent and move on.

My father was a bystander at Christmas, observing, waiting for the next event. The gifts I got from him had my mother’s fingerprints all over them and were beautifully wrapped by her; my dad was a carpenter, not a gift wrapper.

My problem with the holiday is the gift-giving. For children, okay, but grown-ups? I don’t think so. Poor people? Sure. Clothing and groceries, the necessities, but most Americans have much too much stuff already and need to discard. I get email ads for T-shirts with humorous sayings and I delete them and delete the ads for candy and pens and cookware and books. I look at my bookshelves and see dozens of books I’ve been meaning to read, P.G. Wodehouse, The Oxford Book of English Verse, Dante’s Inferno.

It made me feel awful, the sight of books I’ve neglected, and so I put on a coat and took a walk down Columbus Avenue and felt better immediately. I grew up among overly remorseful people and New Yorkers aren’t that type. They walk ahead boldly, not looking back. They don’t say, “Oh, excuse me, I’m sorry” every time they walk near someone.

Thanks to the ubiquitous iPhone, I go for a walk and listen to other people’s conversations, and New Yorkers talk loud. A woman says, “We’re going to Phoenix for Christmas. Steve’s sister’s there, she’s the one who thought she was nonbinary and then she met this guy—” and then the light changed and she crossed and I kept going straight.

I went to a two-chair barbershop for a haircut. I’ve gone to stylists for years but felt like being barbered for a change so I walked in. It made me feel young, the paper tissue around the neck, the spritzing of the hair, the razor, the snipping. The barber was foreign, perhaps Middle Eastern, and had asked me something at the start and I said yes and now as he was busy trimming, I realized I’d agreed to have my hair cut short.

I put on my glasses and looked in the mirror and saw a guy from the early Fifties. No mystic there at all. I looked more like a geometry teacher. He charged me $40 and I tipped him $25, it felt that good to be shorn. I’ve had enough of styling and just want a haircut. The Lord cometh and the valleys shall be exalted and I am lost in the hills. Lord, do for me what you did for the Wise Men from afar. Show me a star.

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It’s been a couple months since the New York City Council legalized jaywalking in town and nobody has noticed this because everybody was doing it anyway. New Yorkers have been jaywalking since before there were stoplights. No New Yorker would stand on the sidewalk, no traffic in sight, and wait for the Walk sign. Nobody, not even Baptists or accountants or people suffering from severe clinical anxiety. Only tourists from the Great Plains would stand and wait for the light to change and this is a clue to pickpockets to lift their wallets.

The main hazard to pedestrians in the city is bicyclists who jayride wildly, flying down the bike lanes, whizzing through red lights, bikes and scooters whipping silently through the winter dark, riders dressed in black, like vampires, riding the wrong way on a one-way street, and especially treacherous are the delivery bikes. New York cops ride around in squad cars and during rush hour a squad car has zero chance of catching a speeding outlaw bicyclist racing through the three-foot gap between parked cars and cars stuck in traffic.

Eating in became popular during the pandemic — ordering food online from a restaurant to be delivered and eating at home. Many people who work from home also eat in — an invisible population that only ventures outdoors when they need to see their ophthalmologist or have a tooth filled — pale stiff-legged people who are uneasy in a crowd and wear masks and avoid eye contact. New Yorkers, of course, expect prompt service, even ordering exotic Thai and Indian dishes with special instructions as to spice and sauce and whether broiled or steamed — they phone in the order and expect it to be at their door on the 15th floor, delivered by Carlos the doorman, within 20 minutes or else they’ll call the Mughlai Temple Café and threaten legal action.

And so you have men on bikes racing through narrow gaps on jammed avenues with a backpack full of shrimp curry and pad thai, meanwhile an elderly man (me) on his way to the drugstore to pick up some Alka-Seltzer stands on the curb, peering into the darkness for some glimmer of light, some sign of motion, some clue as to approaching bicycles. This is the adventure of life in Manhattan, serious bodily injury from bicyclists delivering exotic food at high speed to stay-at-home software programmers.

This is why I pay extra to live in a doorman building. Felipe will deal with the guy on the bike, accept the charred wok vegetable medley and the crispy calamari and drunken noodles with peanut sauce and hand the bag to Lenny, who will bring it up to the 12th floor and leave it at our door and the food will still be hot though the restaurant is a mile away. This is a remarkable amenity. It’s not the cold weather that keeps my sweetie and me indoors, it isn’t the fear of stickups, it’s the fear of being run down by bicyclemen delivering food to other people. The fear of lying in the street while covered with garlic sauce.

Nonetheless, I like New York. I’m glad to be done with lawn mowing and snow shoveling. We live two blocks from the subway where the downtown train will take me to the main library or Lincoln Center or lunch in the Village.

And then there are the little human contacts that make your day, like my visit to the walk-in clinic on Columbus Avenue to have a plastic pad that had become detached from my hearing aid removed from where it was stuck deep in my ear canal. Not a critical problem but you can’t just walk up to someone on the street and say, “Could you take a pencil and get something out of my ear?”

So I sat in the waiting room and was called in to be examined and met a doctor who was (I could tell) slightly amused at the problem. The pad was way in deep, thanks to my trying to dig it out with my finger. I said to her, “You’re a little overeducated for this but where else could I go?” She laughed. She had a nurse hold a light and she reached in with tiny forceps and extracted it. She was from Seattle, had lived in New York for twenty years, and liked it. So do I. No matter what your problem, there’s someone in this city who can deal with it. You just need to watch out for bikes.

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The Christmas season is a trial for us Christians who must wend our way down miles of aisles of trashy merch as musical garbage drizzles down from the speakers in the ceiling and try to keep the nativity of Our Lord in mind, no easy thing, and for this I blame Charles Dickens who took a holy occasion and hung tinsel on it. His message of cheerfulness and sharing in the face of selfish greed is all well and good but it’s not the same as the story of God come to Earth to be made man to show His love for us. One is neighborliness and the other is a miracle and a mystery.

I also blame Irving Berlin and the composers of “Jingle Bells” and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and all the other standards that become termites in the brain. I hear them in the grocery store and I ask myself, “Are there no workhouses? As Scrooge said, “Are there no prisons? Are they still operating? If I had my way, everyone who goes around humming ‘White Christmas’ should be baked with his own pudding until he turns brown and be buried with a sprig of holly through his heart.”

As for Dickens’s story made into a play, it’s been awfully generous to hundreds of American theaters, a sort of National Endowment of Dickens, millions of people paying hard cash to sit down and see the wretched capitalist in his countinghouse, the visit by his cheery nephew Fred on Christmas Eve, the visit by the charity fundraisers, the departure of the clerk Bob Cratchit, the Scrooge supper, and then the sound of chains as the ghost of Marley appears, dragging his cashboxes behind him, to announce the visitations by the three spirits.

This play is what enables theaters to put on Othello and Hedda Gabler and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Which surely is a good thing and provides employment to men and women who may not be cut out to be ophthalmologists so you don’t have someone saying, “Look at my right ear” as he shines a bright light in your eye who would much rather be saying, “To be or not to be, that is the question.” Anything that keeps incompetent people out of the field of medicine is a good thing, and not humbug.

But the shepherds tending their flocks by night in Judea who were summoned by the angel to go to Bethlehem to see the wondrous thing did not go to find jolly people around a Christmas tree with nice gifts and a turkey dinner with a fine wine and rice pudding. They went to confront a miracle that every Christian must believe or not believe or sort of believe or some combination of the three for your entire life, the idea that the Creator had a Son who was made incarnate and grew up Jewish only to be crucified as a fake Messiah. It’s not about snow.

I grew up among Christian literalists who were wary of the Dickens Christmas and felt that the gift-giving was a sentimental notion powered by gift sellers that misrepresented the whole deal — as if the stable were a mall and the shepherds had come to shop for ties and hankies — but my mother grew up with that Christmas so it prevailed in our home and I went along with it for decades, and then, after a Christmas spent with a very pregnant wife sort of clarified the idea of Advent, we’ve come to love the quiet Christmas. I do four Christmas shows this year and at each one the audience will stand in a darkened theater and sing, a cappella, about the silent night calm and bright, and the sound of a thousand people singing from memory and in harmony about the Holy Infant, the quaking shepherds, the radiant beams, this is Christmas enough for the old man.

I would think better of the incoming emperor if I thought he knew the words to “Silent Night” or the Nicene Creed or the Lord’s Prayer or if he found comfort and joy sitting in a pew among other believers and seekers, but of course that’s not my business. It is none the less a blessed time of year as I hike to church and if indeed God became one of us in Bethlehem then a great weight is lifted. Ignore the dark, wait for the light.

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