I dreamed about my Grandma Dora the other night and told her about my vision problems and she said, “There is no cure for carelessness. You should’ve taken a good brisk walk every day and you couldn’t because you lived in the city. But you inherited good genes from me and my husband, thanks to which you have practically no anxiety and sleep well and wake up fresh. So what if you see double and can’t read small print? Do your best with what you have.”

Grandma was a seamstress who made her own elegant clothes. She and her twin sister, Della, were Western Union telegraphers, and Grandma also taught school and was a pre-suffrage feminist, and then she married Grandpa who was a better reader than a farmer but adored her, and she bore him eight children whom she loved dearly and believed could do no wrong. She admired technology and science and looked forward to progress on all fronts. I think I take after Grandpa and luckily avoided farming and took up broadcasting. In that line of work, you give the weather, you don’t depend on it.

There’s nothing so fortunate as having the right ancestors, and Grandma Dora is still with me. And now I am just one year younger than she when she died of a stroke at 84. I sat holding her hand in the hospital, thinking of the questions I wished I had asked. Thanks to anti-seizure meds, I apparently have extra time and I should use it to good purpose and a week or so ago I decided what that purpose should be.

Grandma worked hard all her life, and after she raised her kids and Grandpa died, she made the rounds of her daughters, doing laundry, cooking, cleaning, minding children. I prefer to plow new ground and devote myself to sheer simple unalloyed devotion to pure pleasure and let the world deal with its own problems as best it can. Let a man’s life end with a sabbatical.

I came by this revelation in Logan, Utah, but not from an angel handing me golden tablets. No, from a crowded theater where the audience, at my invitation, sang our national anthem so beautifully, followed by the Battle Hymn of the Republic and “How Great Thou Art” and “It Is Well With My Soul,” in full harmony from the heart, a force of nature, and it brought tears to my eyes, me singing a soft basement part.

I make no comment about their doctrine but Mormons do love to sing. And it was clear from crowd unreaction to a couple lines of mine that a goodly number of them had voted for a convicted criminal and chronic liar who cut cancer research to benefit billionaires, but I say no more. Let George F. Will and Susan B. Glasser take it from here.

I flew home the next day and, without meaning to, boarded an electric passenger cart, the young man at the wheel was so friendly, I got on and immediately felt ashamed — I mean, I’m 83 but I’m still ambulatory — but as he tooled down the concourse, veering through streams of pedestrians, I had to admit, It was enjoyable. The driver was from Rwanda and most of the other cart drivers appeared to be African. They all seemed to know each other and form a brotherhood with the wheelchair pushers, waving to each other, high-fiving, kidding around. There was a lot of good feeling going around. I pursue brotherhood on the stage, storytelling, reciting, humming a note and hearing the crowd sing about the sweet chariot, the brown-eyed girl, the river that flows by the throne of God, the amazing grace, the home on the range.

I come from people who read Ecclesiastes, the verse that says he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow, and so I avoid the front-page story saying that America is incapable of fighting a protracted war against a major power and prevailing — not due to woke generals but to industrial incapacity. I’d rather be happy on the road doing shows. My life is quite easy, why fight it? It’s advantageous to be 83. The country is not looking to my generation for leadership. We’re done. We are, by virtue of old age, humorists. If we take ourselves seriously, we become ridiculous — like our aged commander and his ideas about Canada, Greenland, Gaza, tariffs, the border wall, Ukraine, prosperity, and the use of capital letters to indicate seriousness.

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