Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 9

We had a couple of summery days in November in New York but now, thank goodness, summer is over and we can get back to business. Thanksgiving is done and we spent it with talkative friends and since I was brought up to believe it’s impolite to interrupt, I sat through a two-hour dinner saying nothing but “Uh-huh” and “Oh, really.” And on Sunday I stepped out into a bitter cold wind and walked to church. It felt good.

Summer is too perfect, the dreaminess of it, like an all-Debussy festival, you long for some interesting weather, possibly a tornado. It makes me question the idea of heaven as eternal bliss, which comes from desert tribes who didn’t know about ice and snow.

All my vacations in Florida I was glad to see come to an end, especially the ones on the Gulf Coast where your motel room is likely to look out on a strip mall and a six-lane freeway. The Jews go to the east coast of Florida, the ocean side, and a person should follow the Jews: do not vacation in Egypt, you’re not going to like it.

I assume that we Episcopalians will go to heaven — we are very very nice people and not the sort you can imagine God hurling into the lake of fire — but what little we know about heaven from Scripture, the praising and rejoicing, doesn’t sound like something I care to do endlessly. For years, okay, but after half a million years it’d be heavenly to have a day of complaint and lamentation. My Unitarian friends will refuse to go to heaven because it discriminates against atheists. And heaven is authoritarian and Unitarians would demand to have seats on the planning committee. I’ll miss them.

Walking to church on December 1st, against a cold wind, made me very grateful to get there, walk into the warm sanctuary, have a cup of coffee, shake hands with people. And up front hung the Advent wreath waiting for the first candle to be lit.

Christmas changed for me 27 years ago. It got small. My mother loved the holiday and we had the tree and stockings and piles of gifts and the big dinner, and I did my best to keep up the tradition after I left home. For a few years I spent Christmases in Copenhagen where Christmas is a monthlong festival with obligatory traditions galore. My Danish friends didn’t necessarily believe in sanctification by faith but they believed in singing all the carols around an enormous tree elaborately decorated and then opening piles of gifts properly wrapped and not merely with adhesive tape but also with ribbon tied into bows, followed by a dinner of roast goose, red cabbage and rice pudding, followed by serious drinking.

But in1997, as Christmas approached, my wife was nine months pregnant and we sat in our New York apartment with no need of tree or gifts or goose. The anticipation was everything. We lit a candle and waited day after day and on the 29th the holy child arrived and the obstetrical nurse handed her to me, her arms waving, her legs dancing, and the crappy songs vanished, the stores full of junk, the Christmas tree lots, the glittery lights, and it’s been a beautiful simple holiday ever since.

I don’t come to church Sunday morning as a saint, I come to contemplate my messy life and the time I’ve wasted and friends I’ve abandoned, but on this Sunday morning the deacon read from Luke’s Gospel loud and clear, “Be on guard that your hearts are not weighted down with the worries of this life” — Astonishing! A command to lightheartedness! — the opposite of what unbelievers believe church is all about.

On the way out, I stop to congratulate the deacon for reading Luke in a big bold voice, and she says, “I love the Word.” And now I do too.

Be on guard. Enjoy the simple pleasures, prayer, the benediction, the rousing Bach postlude, the handshakes, and the luxury of the warm taxi ride home, the embrace of my love who meets me at the door, the fresh coffee, and a sugary doughnut. We live in troubled times but perhaps there needs to be a time-out from trouble and maybe I’ll make it Sunday. Put the worries of this life aside.

We light the wreath of Advent,

A season whose coming is meant

To lighten the spirit

Of those who come near it

And make us reasonably content.

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The great George Will has passed the fifty-mile mark as a newspaper columnist, and all the rest of us in the trade admire the fact that he still enjoys doing it. It’s palpable in his work. Anybody can throw spitballs but Mr. Will loves the American language and the construction of sentences and paragraphs. This, rather than his correctitude, is what makes him worth reading. It’s a pleasure.

I enjoy the New York Times and I love it all the more now that I see it has practically no power at all. When I took Professor Hage’s Journalism 101 course, back when Kennedy was president and I was a parking lot attendant and a fan of Pete Seeger, I imagined that the great and mighty picked up the Times with fear and foreboding, and I went into journalism for the thrill of being a nerd in horn-rimmed glasses who could bring down the powerful. I got a job writing obituaries at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and after six months on the burial detail, I left quietly.

And now, despite journalism, the American people have elected to high office a conman and fabulist who dismisses the Times as fish wrap and he has proposed people for Cabinet positions whom you wouldn’t want on your co-op board, whose résumés set off shrill alarms, and it’s clear that the man is using his appointments to express his contempt for government, same as if a man who hates baseball bought the Yankees and hired a coaching staff of soccer moms. The Times wields less power than the rector of the president-elect’s church if he attended church, which he does not.

But the Times photo desk, bless their hearts, is enjoying the game of choosing unflattering photographs of the Cabinet nominees. The Defense Secretary is wearing a drugstore tie and too much hair product and looks as though he’s pleading innocent to a charge of public urination. The Attorney General looks like a Florida blonde who hostesses at a steakhouse and comedy club. The Secretary of State’s pants are bunched up in the crotch and his paunch is prominent and he’s telling his wife, “I’ve been waiting here for half an hour just like you told me to.” The Surgeon General is wearing a billowy red dress she bought at 70% off list price and there are food stains on her bosom. The Treasury Secretary seems to be saying, “That’s not my linguini. I ordered the one with clam sauce.”

These are not the pictures their mothers would put in a nice silver frame and place on the piano. Each of us has been photographed in moments when we did not look impressive or even mentally stable, and we dispose of these pictures insofar as they come into our possession. The Times photo desk enjoys displaying them for the amusement of readers. You sit down to your bran flakes and here’s a photograph of the president-elect that tells you (1) he thinks he’s incredibly handsome and his hair is a work of art and (2) he hasn’t learned how to do makeup.

It’s the only real power the press has, the ability to irritate. The great man talks about his very high IQ and never needing Viagra and the press quotes him and it doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t. His outrageousness dulls the mind of the body politic and we go into WHATEVER mode. Elon Musk, a man whose companies have $15 billion in contracts with the federal government, is put in charge of cutting government spending? Whatever.

You and I have approximately nothing to say about this and that’s the benefit of being a loser. The people who are celebrating now are on the hook and you and I may as well join a choir or read Great Books. The time you would’ve spent reading stories that make you draw on your reserves of profanity would be better spent practicing kindness and doing your part to keep American humor alive by telling jokes. People used to do this.

The Congressman went to church on Sunday and took a seat in a pew next to a hefty woman and when they stood for the opening hymn, he noticed that her dress was caught in her crack so he reached over and pulled it out. She glared at him so he figured she wanted it back in and when he did, she slapped him hard and said, “I wouldn’t vote for you if you were St. Peter himself.” He said, “Ma’am, if I were St. Peter, you wouldn’t be in my district.”

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My mother, Grace, and her sister Elsie were lifelong best friends, two adjacent younger girls in a family of 13, and our two families had Thanksgiving together every year, usually at Elsie’s house because she was the better cook, a perfectionist, whereas Mother had six kids, four of us boys, which didn’t encourage perfection. Mostly, she served chow.

We were quiet devout people, the women exemplified mannerliness and motherhood, the men were taciturn and could quote Scripture, nobody smoked or drank or swore, the baby napped on a bed among the coats, and the afternoon proceeded along two tracks, heading for a collision: the dinner on one track, Packers-Lions game on the other.

Uncle Don was a Packer fan, from Wausau, and had played guard in the days of the single-wing offense. He was a big man with a big bark and he got intensely involved emotionally with the game. My dad never played football and thought that fanhood was childish, perhaps even unchristian. Don’s two boys and my three brothers and I sat on the couch or on the floor, Dad sat in an armchair, and Don got up close to the screen where he could yell at it. My Dad looked at a book, any book, to avoid seeing a grown man yelling at an appliance, “That was holding! You didn’t see that? Open your eyes, ref! He had both arms around him. He was tackling him and the guy didn’t even have the ball!” And we boys watched this seminar on the meaning of masculinity, as the women coaxed the dinner toward the goal line.

Lavish aromas, six well-behaved boys, my absentee father, and Uncle Don living and dying with the Packers, sometimes moving laterally with the play. He simply could not contain himself. All my other uncles — I had a dozen of them — were soft-spoken men who avoided showing strong emotion, and here was Don — in his heart, he was on the bench, suited up, ready to go in and bash heads.

But when dinner was ready, it was brought to the long table and we were summoned. Don turned the sound down and took his place at the head of the table and said a prayer thanking God for His goodness and mercy and for sending us a Savior, but even when praying he was listening to the announcer in the next room. It was a gorgeous feast: sage stuffing in the great bird’s carcass, baked yams, baked rolls, cranberries, and Don dashing into the living room to yell, “Ya gotta be kidding! How can you pass on third and two??”

Christmas is complicated, sometimes treacherous, involving gift-giving and therefore guilt and matters of taste, but Thanksgiving is a peasant holiday, and good taste plays no part in it, you simply come to the table. Elsie’s feast was, of course, the dinner of all dinners, generous, comfortable, the giblet gravy, the cranberry mold, and Elsie hovering overhead, coaxing, replenishing the platters, apologizing for the food though it was perfect, the mashed potatoes that somehow fell short of their potential, the stuffing what was overcooked (but it was not). My poor father sat in silence, unable to converse with women or children, he loathed football, he wanted to talk about exodus, mainly his own.

The sun set, the table was cleared. A period of lethargy followed, a few rounds of Rook or Flinch, and then we attacked the pies. The holiday dwindled, the baby cried. The leftovers were wrapped and apportioned, the little kids were bundled up, the long goodbyes were said, in the kitchen, and in the driveway, and through the open car windows.

There was much more to Don than football. That’s why you should stick close to family, so you can come to appreciate them. He was a serious student of the Bible. He became a good preacher. When Elsie lay dying, he kept her home and took care of her right up to the end. He told me: “Of course I took care of her. I didn’t hire someone to come in and do it. I loved her.”

In church this past Sunday, we sang “Now thank we all our God,” and I walked home, a freezing wind whipping through the city canyons, thinking of loved ones far away. Life is good, thank You for this. The country has elevated a cruel and corrupt man to power and now we shall see what good our Constitution is and what sort of senators and judges we have. God bless us. More we do not need.

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It’s the hunting season and also the mating season for deer, a cruel combination — you’re excited by the scent of a female, she turns her beautiful brown eyes your way and your heart pounds and you paw the ground and snort and wave your antlers and then you smell beer and turn and a guy in a red plaid jacket blows your brains out. I never hunted because my dad and uncles weren’t hunters so there was nobody to show me how to do it.

Hunting is hereditary and I’m astonished that a half-million hunting licenses are issued annually in Minnesota and I don’t know any hunters: it means that I’m an outsider, an oddball.

Men hunt for the same reason they fish, in order to escape the company of women. Minnesota is a state of thousands of lakes and each one gives men an opportunity for refuge, sitting in a rowboat or a fishing shack out on the ice where nobody will say, “When are you going to clean out the garage?” Or “You keep talking about going to teacher conferences at the kids’ school but when is this going to happen if ever?” or “Why do you insist on dribbling coffee down the front of the kitchen cabinet and not wiping it up?”

Not many women fish because they know they can buy excellent salmon, tuna, or halibut for a tiny fraction of the cost of a boat and motor and trailer and a pickup to tow it. Ever compare salmon and northern pike? God created pike for cat food.

I’ve been a member of various minorities in my life, having grown up fundamentalist among people who didn’t drink or dance or go to movies or use the Lord’s name in vain, and in college I joined a microscopic minority of people who write limericks.

Minneapolis is great. Have you seen it?

The streets go from Aldrich to Zenith.

It’s the birthplace of Prince,

Than whom no one since

Has been any hipper, I mean it.

The city is good for the sickly.

The streets are numerical, strictly,

And alphabetical

All so that medical

Teams can get to you quickly.

I am in the minority of Americans who read newspapers that subscribe to a code of objectivity. Our number is shrinking, and I can imagine the day when readers give up curiosity in favor of self-affirmation. I don’t wish to see that day and so I’m grateful to be in the minority of octogenarian Americans. We are out of touch and don’t know who the contemporary celebrities are, which one discovers is a loss one can easily live with. It gives you more room to focus on the natural world, birds, trees, little kids, the sun and stars.

I am one of the million-and-a-half Episcopalians in America, whose membership has been declining for years. We don’t know why but we don’t spend much time worrying about it either.

I don’t go to church because I’m a good person. I’m not, and I know that because I don’t hunt or fish so I spend more time around women and women are quite aware of human failings and when they give you a righteous glance, you can feel it. No, I only know how to imitate goodness, and when I sit in church and say the prayers and sing the hymns and listen to Scripture, it takes me out of the world and into the universe. And I feel united to the people around me, young, old, men, women, Black, white, all of us fragile, mortal, heading in the same direction.

My friends assembled to carry

Me to the town cemetery,

A gust of wind blew,

And the ashes all flew,

Leaving nothing of Gary to bury.

My memory was kept

By the sexton who swept

Up the dust. God heal

My soul. He is real

And now I am imaginary.

I wrote it in church during the sermon, which, God forgive me, lost me on a sharp turn, but when I look to my right, I see the chapel where, 29 years ago this week, I held my lover Jenny’s hands and we made our vows. I’m an old man in love and, independent though we be, we are a happy couple. I pray for you and yours. Be kind to others. Don’t be like the fellow of Bellingham so stubborn that there was no telling him. His wife said, “My dear, I wish you weren’t here.” He ignored her and she wound up selling him.

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Man has almost unlimited power to do damage and cause suffering, as we have been learning lately, and some slight power to do good, but as we grow up and pay attention to our surroundings, we see that we are beneficiaries of great gifts for which we can claim no credit, and so we have a day of thanksgiving in November, just as we’re bracing for winter. My aunt Eleanor was the patron saint of Thanksgiving and rented a nearby Legion hall and organized a dinner for a hundred or more Keillors back when I was a kid, before cellphones, so instead of taking selfies we had conversation.

My aunts told stories about the farm and how Grandpa drove a horse-drawn mower to cut hay with the reins in one hand and a book in the other and the day the house burned down and he raked through the ashes looking for photographs and how he drove home with his first Model T Ford and lost control of the car and pulled back on the wheel yelling “Whoa!” as the car slid into the ditch and he sat in it laughing at himself.

I am thankful for those big reunions and for my aunt’s friendship. I live in New York now and have a 1920 photograph on the wall of Grandpa walking down the road with my ten-year-old dad on one side and tiny Eleanor on the other. I am grateful for my first-grade teacher, Estelle Shaver, who kept me after school to reach aloud to her as she corrected workbooks. It was remedial reading but she made it seem like a privilege and I’ve felt privileged ever since.

For generations, women had the easy work of Thanksgiving, which was cooking the meal, and men had the hard job of making conversation. They sat in the living room with a football game on the TV, exchanging monosyllables after a fumble or a touchdown, as familiar smells drifted out of the kitchen where women told family secrets too shocking for men to handle. I’m okay with that.

I sit and stare at the screen watching men crash into each other and I’m grateful for cowardice: I never played football so now I don’t have the aches and pains that my heroic classmates have. I fooled around with drugs in college but they were cheap crummy drugs, not the powerful chemicals of today that lead a person to make a life sleeping in the park. I’m grateful that I was born late enough so that when I developed mitral valve problems, open-heart surgery was rather common so I didn’t die in my late 50s as two of my uncles did.

And I never was cursed with the sense of my own giftedness. People told me I was but I knew better. I have successfully avoided literary awards so I am not oppressed by my own eminence. Every morning I feel like a beginner.

So many blessings, and I haven’t even mentioned friendship, sunsets, public transportation, Christian hymnody, anti-seizure meds, other people’s toddlers, baseball, hearing aids, the steady thoughtful leadership of my wife, fluoridation, the Dairy Queen Heath Bar Blizzard, dental floss, my duet partner Heather Masse, the psalms of David, drip-grind coffee, cats, YouTube, trees, parks, rivers, the prairie, sonnets, Google, and cranberries.

Cranberries are the heart of Thanksgiving dinner. You don’t want a gourmet dinner that distracts you from your life blessings, so you serve turkey, a profoundly average dish. Every turkey dinner is about as good as any other turkey dinner. Same with pumpkin pie. But cranberries are terribly exciting. They are the Robert Frost of fruits, the Flaubert, the Frank Lloyd Wright, the Gabriel Fauré. You can overcook the turkey and serve a pumpkin pie that is just pudding with a crust, but if you serve cranberries you’re okay.

Be happy, my dears. America will soon see the return of the dopiest president in our history. Anyone who nominates Matt Gaetz to be Attorney General and Bobby Kennedy Jr. to be Secretary of Health needs GPS to show him the way to the bathroom, but keep this in mind: many of America’s cranberry growers voted for him and many people whose cranberry sauce has the power to make you stand on your tiptoes and yodel. Think about that for a moment. There is some good in all of us, maybe more than we know. And be happy on Thanksgiving.

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Every morning when I wake up, I ask myself: what have I done the previous day that entitles me to draw upon the nation’s precious water supply and enjoy a hot shower? I don’t see this as a basic human right; it should be earned. And what I did the other day was accompany my beloved to the Met to see Puccini’s Tosca.

She dearly loves grand opera and I dearly love her, and I was glad to go for the chance to see the tenor be executed and the soprano leap to her death. I enjoy violence more when it’s accompanied by great music.

What makes the Met’s Tosca remarkable is that the tenor’s girlfriend Tosca, sung by the six-two Norwegian goddess Lise Davidsen, towers over him and when they embrace, he disappears, and when they sing a duet, you forget he’s there. Her voice can go from pianissimo to pee-in-your-pants forte in two seconds and during one duet I somehow found myself thinking about transgenderdom. When I listen to people sing in Italian, my mind wanders.

The subject of transgender was more prominent in Trump’s 2024 campaign than in any presidential election I can recall. Reagan never went there, nor did George W. Maybe I’m hanging out with the wrong people but I wasn’t aware that it was such a major issue, the fear of trans boys competing in girls’ basketball.

I am not without prejudice and I admit that I would prefer that my cardiologist be okay with his or her birth gender. I’m not proud of it but there it is. As for basketball, I take no interest in it whatsoever and haven’t for years.

But the current bromance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, World’s Richest Man, forces me to take up the subject. I’ve long thought that there is something sopranoish and prima Donald about Trump, the fussiness with the hair, the adoration of the spotlight, the reverence for makeup. And Mar-a-Lago with all the frilliness and glitz, the gilded cherubs, the ladylike glamour — no man I know would feel comfortable there.

So watching the man’s victory speech on Election Night in which he spoke so admiringly about Musk’s Space-X rocket, it struck me as odd: you’ve just been elected Leader of the Free World and you’re fascinated by the size of another man’s rocket?

It just made me wonder if we haven’t elected our first trans president before electing our first woman.

El Don’s obsession with trans people in his campaign bore unmistakable signs of self-loathing and I think that we hippy-libs have a duty to encourage him to come out of the locker room and embrace his identity.

It’s heartwarming to see a 78-year-old person head-over-heels for a guy devoted to cars and rockets, and now that La Donna is elected, he can cut the macho act and bring out the pantsuits and high heels and just be himself. I’m an old Marxist-Communist but still I think power should be liberating: take that Oval Office and ovulate to your heart’s content, pal. “Trump Will Fix It” was the slogan and now it’s time for him/her/them to fix him/her/them. Everybody could tell that he needed a new pronoun and now he can have it by executive order.

Dawn is in love with his Musk,

They’re dancing together at dusk.

Each little fist bump

Makes her heart jump,

His tail and his tush and his tusk.

I wish Kamala had become First Woman President because she seemed actually interested in government and policy issues, more than in sharks and electric boats and Arnie Palmer’s manhood. But so be it, the voters have spoken. But let’s try to see the bright side.

If you are a soybean farmer in North Dakota and you feel God made a mistake in giving you a penis, you are in a tough spot and most trans farmers would take the easy way out and move to West Palm Beach, but a President with the courage to come out publicly on Day One and accept what is so clear about him could change that instantly.

He is a great storyteller. He loves the unexpected. His nomination of a Fox News host to head the Defense Department, and Matt Gaetz, under investigation for drug use and sex trafficking, nominated to be Attorney General. So why not hold a press conference wearing a sparkly red gown and jangly jewelry? People want entertainment. They’ll be talking about it for weeks. Fashion will trump inflation.

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I like flying out of the Atlanta airport. I go through Screening and the TSA lady scouts through my briefcase and wipes my shoes with a cloth to detect explosive fragments and then she says, “You’re good to go, sweetheart.” First I’m a suspected terrorist and then I’m a close personal friend. I did two shows in Georgia last week, after the tragic election, at both of which I walked out onstage and said, “It’s been a hard week for us Marxist-Communists, but there’s a song I want you to sing that is often played triumphantly by brass bands but it’s not about triumph so much as survival, the fact that after the rockets’ glare and bombs bursting in air, the flag was still flying” and I hummed the note and a thousand people stood and sang it majestically, a cappella, with four-part harmony on the land of the free and the brave. Some ushers told me the audience was at least half Republican. It was very moving. What they did to the nation was shameful but at least they’re capable of human feeling. They sang gorgeously.

The next morning, a woman came over to me in the dining room of the hotel and said she had flown from Houston to see the show and had enjoyed it and we fell into conversation. She’d grown up in Vicksburg in the Sixties and discovered early on that she had an affinity for math and studied it in college and rose to a point where she was often the lone woman in the room. She remembered some of her professors hinting that she’d gone into math in order to find a good husband. But her love of math was based on a love of logic, that there are clear lines between true and false, that truth can be proven, and her sorrow about the election was that falsehood had won and would wield great power.

Trump had exploited fear and resentment and bigotry to exploit divisiveness to win the day and she remembered how, in the Vicksburg of her childhood, the church ladies of town, black and white ladies in big hats, had joined forces so maintain a standard of civility.

It’s rare that I get to talk with a member of my audience — sometimes people walk up with their phone out and say, “Do you mind if I bother you for a selfie?” and we huddle together and they come away with a snapshot of themselves with an old man, but what happened with the Houston woman was a face-to-face encounter just as we used to do before Facebook and Facetime.

And then I had another conversation with a woman who’d been at the show. She was 40, the mother of two kids whom she was homeschooling in order, she said, to give them a chance to find themselves and grow into their personalities without the powerful distractions of TV and video, cellphones, social media, which she felt corrupt a child’s imagination. She limited her kids to thirty minutes of video a day and cellphones were forbidden. No texting, no posting. She could see the benefits up close, the flowering of their minds, their feelings, their expressiveness.

Again, it was a genuine encounter, sitting at a table, drinking coffee. The first woman apologized for “bothering” me but conversation is no bother, never has been. She had sat in Symphony Hall and listened to me and now I got to return the favor and hear the story of a woman who’d had a happy career in mathematics, not teaching it but applying it in the scientific corporate world. If I want privacy, I know how to find it, but public spaces are meant for these encounters.

I’m grateful that, as a kid, I got to experience “visiting,” when the family got in the car and dropped in at someone’s house and sat around and visited. We kids sat quietly and listened to the elders reminisce about their childhoods, which could be a true revelation, hearing their different versions of history, who looked out the window of the schoolhouse and cried, “Our house is on fire!” and the day Joe Loucks drowned in the Rum River, and the winter night Grandpa woke up the seven of them and got them dressed and hiked out to the meadow to look at the silver timber wolf howling at the moon. What lives in memory is firsthand experience. I read the pundits’ eulogies but I remember those two women and those two audiences.

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So America has gone and done it, elected the evil grandpa, which goes to show that literacy is in serious decline. Nobody who read the transcripts of his two-hour rants would want this old man in the White House. I’ve been reading them with fascination for the past couple months and they are beyond description, the anger and violent obsessions, the confusion, the incredible frequency of blatant falsehoods, the absence of any coherent philosophy, but now the Secret Service is going to have to guard him on his daily golf round, probably requiring the help of the Army and Marines, and who knows if there will be another election in 2026? Congress will be deadlocked, the man owns the Supreme Court, who will stop him if he declares the name of our country is now United Trump?

The beauty of being on the losing side is that there is no shame. Kamala Harris was a serious and tireless candidate who ran a heroic campaign and spoke about the real world, and the outcome shows the high degree of misogyny among American women. She could have been an excellent president. Everyone in my life voted for her, nobody ever walked up to me and tried to talk about her opponent’s good points, so it’s clear that I don’t live in his country. And because I’m 82 and he never talked about cutting Medicare and Social Security or deporting elderly people or accused us of having bad blood or eating dogs and cats, I can rest easy. His 20% tariffs are likely to cause inflation but an old man doesn’t need much to get along.

And the gorgeous thing about being a Democrat is that I can stop reading the newspaper and ignore Washington and walk around the Upper West Side of Manhattan where the Don got maybe 12% of the vote and enjoy the parks, the cafes, the little kids heading for school in the morning, talk to people in the subway, go to the public library on 42nd Street and sit in the reading room among college kids and work on my musical comedy.

The country voted against politics Tuesday and voted in a man who will fix everything. He will make Ukraine and Gaza disappear. Big tax cuts, Bobby Kennedy Jr. will end fluoridation and eliminate vaccines, Elon Musk will cut two or three trillion from the national budget, the U.S. Army will round up ten or eleven million undocumented migrants, many of whom are employed on farms or in hotels or nursing homes, and the profound results of all of this are on the heads of the Make America Cruel Again people.

I’m glad that Minnesota went blue though it was a close one, and I have to admit that Lake Wobegon went 58% for the Don and that will be the subject of my next book. It’s going to be a comic novel. Norwegians can be cranky, as any Minnesotan knows, and though they’ve been here for five or six generations, America has been a disappointment for many of them, they feel ignored or looked down upon and the Lutheran pastor talks like a socialist sometimes. They don’t like the Germans and the feeling is mutual and many of their children have married aliens, and there is resistance to the idea of public education (why should we pay for it after our kids have grown up) and coffee costs 50 cents that used to cost a dime. Nothing is like it used to be, young people are rude and go around with earphones and they mumble and you can’t read their handwriting and the language is vulgar. They’ve been unfairly dealt with left and right and they like the Don because he’s been mistreated too and is angry and he’s going to fix things. Nuts to Europe, to hell with Mexico and South America, and let’s show the Chinese who is who. Congress is a mess, can’t get anything done. We need one man who can take charge and do the job right and anybody who doesn’t like it, send them to Canada.

There’s a whole novel here and I’m going to enjoy writing it and I’m tired of worrying about democracy. You go worry about it and stew over the news. I’m done. The New York Times said that a vote for Kamala was the only patriotic option. Which shows you how important the Times is.

No, journalism is dead. There is no point in stating facts anymore. I’m going back to fiction. It’s worked beautifully for the Don and now it’s my turn.

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When I go to Trader Joe’s on Columbus Avenue to buy groceries, I do it to buy guy food, which my beloved cannot buy because she knows it’s not good for me. I don’t do this secretly; I come home in broad daylight and unpack the bag and she watches without comment. Sometimes, in place of comment, she’ll tell about something she read in the Times about some encouraging development in health care or public education, meanwhile she watches me put away the frozen mac and cheese, large potatoes for baking in the microwave, a few ears of sweet corn, a couple filets mignon, frozen lasagna, frozen meatballs, frozen knockoff White Castle sliders.

I don’t buy greens because that’s her territory, along with other vegetables, coffee, olive oil, cereal, rice, condiments, et cetera. With coffee, for example, she has a specific dark bean from a particular valley in Guatemala that meets her standards. Me, I’m happy with Maxwell House Instant. Coffee is coffee. She favors Portuguese oil from hand-harvested olives. Me, I’m fine with Mazola.

I don’t defend my choices and thanks to her, I don’t need to. I love mac and cheese because I loved grade school back in the Fifties and that’s what Mabel served in the Benson School cafeteria and when I eat a bowl of it now, I am back there sitting with boys and observing Corinne and Elaine and Diane with great interest. As a teenager, I loved to ride my bike downtown to the Minneapolis Public Library and I got my lunch at the White Castle across the street, sliders for 15 cents apiece. When I heat up a frozen one today, I am 15 again, enjoying independence, spending my babysitting money, reading Hemingway and Kafka and Cummings and other books my parents don’t approve of.

Joe doesn’t always stock radishes but if I see them, I buy a bunch because picking radishes was my first job around the age of 12, and I graduated from that to potato picking and hoeing corn.

I like Trader Joe’s because the clientele is half my age or less and I stand with my cart in a long double line with college kids and mothers of tiny children and I listen to fragments of phone conversations that are fresh and fascinating to me. These people lean toward eagerness and curiosity with a streak of satire; my people tend toward dismay and resignation. The lines move fast at Trader Joe’s because the store has 24 checkout cashiers and as I come toward checkout, this being New York, I wonder how many of the cashiers are hoping to be actors, writers, artists, dancers, composers, and I worry about them as I catch sight. I was a dishwasher when I was their age and I hoped to be published in The New Yorker where my heroes Updike, Perelman, Thurber published. For me, the magazine was the Big League and I needed to climb out of the Minors and when I made it, at 27, I bought filet mignon.

The Bigs are still around but the young and ambitious have found new roads — podcasting, for example — in which you pitch your own tent and invent your brand and see who stops to look at the goods. I find this sort of astonishing and wonderful. I look at the young and see how their ambition is to make their own good and productive life rather than win the silver trophy or be admitted to the Big Shot Society.

My beloved is 15 years younger than I and while I sit and toil at my new novel, her ambition is to walk six miles a day through the city and see the sights, the barefoot cellist in the park, the woman telling her dog to improve its attitude, the delight of apartment children set free on the playground, and talk to the French tourists taking photos of squirrels and the guy with the sign “Write You A Poem, $5.”

I want my novel to win the National Book Award. It won’t but that’s what I want. She wants to make a good life and every day she does. I come home with my autobiographical bag of groceries and she makes no comment. Life circles back. I eat Mabel’s macaroni and I am once again curious about girls. I once picked potatoes and now eat one with butter and sour cream and it is delicious and I feel truly grateful.

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I took the fast train from London to Edinburgh a few weeks ago to do my solo show at Queen’s Hall and sitting in the café car watching the countryside pass at a hundred miles per hour, I felt utterly happy. It was the fourth day of my tour and finally I was emerging from the prison grip of jet lag, which I’d tried to sleep off, which only makes it worse. The cure is daylight, movement. Now I was feeling resurrected.

When I visit Scotland, I think of my grandpa William Denham who emigrated from Glasgow to Minneapolis in 1905. I only knew him as a querulous old guy with high-top leather shoes who pronounced “girls” “gettles” but cousin Joyce told me he left to escape the Calvinist cruelty of his stepmother. William and his wife had 13 children, my mother Grace the 10th, but the first kid was born only four months after the wedding. He was never forgiven. When he returned years later to visit his dying father, he kept a detailed journal of the voyage and it goes blank once he reaches Scotland. My guess is that guilt and shame shut the door. The story couldn’t be told.

I got to the hotel in Edinburgh and hiked from Grassmarket up to the castle through throngs of lively youth, a parade of languages and dialects, including some like his. A guy played electric guitar to a blues rhythm track and sang, I assumed, about a woman who’d left him but it might’ve been about a stepmother, I couldn’t tell. Three little kids sat on the curb admiring a hairy terrier, patting him in wonderment, and he tolerated their admiration well. I saw three stunning beauties nearby, their hair pale red, their very own hereditary hair, and immediately wanted to get to know them better, but I pulled myself away and kept walking. But I am still stunned a week later.

A café advertised “Breakfast and A Pint” where some folks were chasing their scrambled eggs and bacon with beer and around the corner a fine baritone played mandolin and sang about the bonny banks and braes of Loch Lomond. I was his lone audience. I saw only some coinage in his mandolin case — and yes, I know it’s a smart street singer’s strategy to keep an empty case — but I dropped in a twenty-pound note anyway. The twenty shocked him and he stumbled on the verse about the wee birdies singing. But I sang the song in my show that night and the audience sang it with me and it was very sweet.

A sunny day, cool, 50ish, and I sat in a sidewalk café and had lentil soup and coffee and watched the river of youth flowing by and felt happy and content. The secret of happiness, I guess, is to get jet-lagged and then emerge from it and also to be ignorant of the American election news, to not be a radical left-wing Marxist enemy within but simply a very happy old man in a square in Edinburgh.

My grandpa fathered 13 children, a man of enthusiasm, and died at 73, deep in dementia. I am 82 and still trying to make sense and that night at my show, I recited love poems by Burns and Blake and Shakespeare and my poem about sperm,

Beneath its shiny dome, it contains your chromosomes, and the tail can kick just like a leg. Nothing could be fina than to swim up a vagina in search of a rendezvous with an egg,

and I talked about the beauty of being old, assuming one has a little luck, which I do, having never been a criminal defendant, never fallen off a roof, never taught third grade, and at my recent checkup the doctor skipped the digital prostate exam. It felt good to be away from America and walk in the streams of youth up the hill toward the castle and buy marmalade and whisky fudge for my true love and enjoy a sunny October day.

Grandpa, I don’t understand my country anymore, but it’s okay. Life gets small at this age, and somehow a sunny day and coffee, the parade of youth, the bonnie banks, the gettles with pale red hair are enough. Coffee comes in at the mouth and love comes at the eye. That is all we know of truth ere we grow old and die. I think of her and sigh and I’m crazy happy.

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