I was on a long car trip, Atlanta to Nashville to St. Louis to Chicago, doing my stand-up comedy act this week, and in St. Louis came the horrible video of the jetliner going down in Ahmedabad, crashing into the medical college, the pilot’s Mayday cry of “I have no thrust,” the horrific death toll, one passenger surviving, and I sat backstage at the club, asking myself, “Do I mention this tragedy?” It seems perverse to ignore it but sort of sanctimonious to mention it — and how do I do it? Say a prayer? Ask for a moment of silence. And how to make a bridge from the elegiac to the jokes, which is what the customers came for. So I went out and did my act. Life is precarious and so we should be grateful and I will show my gratitude by making people laugh.

I took up gratitude some years ago when Dr. Dearani at Mayo replaced a valve in my heart and I went for a walk down the hall the next morning, thinking about my aunt and uncles who died in their 50s from the same congenital malfunction. I had come to the end of my life expectancy and was operating on gift time. It had nothing to do with good diet and exercise, it was about fine technology. I’m a writer, I’m not sure I could sew a patch on a pair of jeans. And on that walk, I gave up satire and snark and the fine art of spitballing the pretentious solemnity of poohbahs and solipsists and turned to the adoration of competence and ingenuity and nobility. This is a good strategy especially during the reign of America’s first utterly corrupt president. Pay him mind and he will wear you out and make you feel hopeless about the country. I choose not to be.

I am ten years older than my grandfathers, thanks to blood thinners and drugs that keep me from falling face-first in the waffles and talking jibber-jabber. As Solomon said, the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong, the race is to those who took care to be born late enough to take advantage of scientific advances

I’m a lucky man, thank goodness for it. I have writer friends my age who’ve been stuck for years because their previous book was greeted by heavyweight critics as “provocative and profound,” “unflinching,” “lushly layered,” and “exquisitely crafted,” and what do you do for an encore? The most reviewers have said about me was “amusing yet often poignant.” That’s not a pedestal, it’s a low curb.

When I was ten, I rode my bike from our house in the country into downtown Minneapolis, pedaling past factories and warehouses and printing plants and through the red-light district to the great sandstone castle of the central library where I climbed the stairs past the Egyptian mummy in his glass case and a facsimile of the Declaration of Independence in another, up to the reading room on the third floor and sat devouring books and then writing bookish things on a yellow legal pad with a sharp pencil, thereby finding something that would make me happy for the rest of my life so far.

When I was 11, Dad took me on a drive to New York City. He didn’t want to but Mother made him. He went to visit friends of his from when the Army stationed him in New York and she sent me along as a ball and chain, believing that the father of six children had no right to go gallivanting halfway across the country for pleasure. I was dazzled by New York of course and also by the realization that my father the soldier had had a very enjoyable time in World War II. Other men did the fighting and dying and thanks to them, a man in uniform was treated as a hero in New York, even though he was only a mail clerk. This story fascinated me. A revelation of the injustice of life. Two men, same uniform: one dines out at the Oyster Bar and is petted by the waitress, one gets shot up on the beach at Normandy and goes home in a box. The luck of the draw.

I’m still lucky. All the more reason to show mercy to the less lucky. And to stand up in front of strangers and make them happy. Our country is in the throes of awful cruelty and we the grateful must rise up and defeat it.

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