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Last night I went to sleep by my girl

My friend Lynn, a personal trainer, has given me a list of twelve useful exercises to strengthen the core muscles and improve the sense of balance and I’ve been thinking about doing them, meanwhile I’ve been concerned with other matters, such as which came first, the can or the can opener. This question has no relevance to my life or yours and yet — what is the relevance of relevance at this point in my life? I need questions to answer, otherwise I lie in bed at night with a song repeating in my head, such as “Please Please Me” or “When They Ring Those Golden Bells,” both of them infectious. So the question of can openers is how I spare myself from thinking “Last night I said these words to my girl.”

The answers to all of life’s questions are on the internet and this is why I don’t get out and walk. Things I might’ve had to walk to the library to find out are in my computer on my desk. So here I am. An English merchant named Peter Durand invented the can around 1800, which made it possible to preserve food aboard ships for long voyages. People used knives or other sharp instruments to open them until 1858 when the can opener was patented. This probably saved a great many sailors from stabbing themselves in the hand, which, in those primitive times, probably meant serious infections from bacteria on knives also used to gut fish and shuck oysters. Some galley crew, opening cans, probably lost a hand to a fish-borne disease and replaced it with a hook and thereby became pirates and wound up being hanged. Mothers grieved for them back in Yorkshire and Liverpool. Then the can opener came along and piracy went into decline, shiploads of immigrants sailed unmolested to our shores, the Industrial Age began, slaves were emancipated, the automobile was invented, radio came along, and the 20th century, without people having to jab holes in cylindrical containers.

Thomas Keillor sailed over from Yorkshire in 1774, before the can was invented, a five-week voyage to Halifax, and Lord knows what the family ate: ships in those days assumed, in stocking provisions, that a good number of the passengers would perish at sea, but the Keillors persisted, hardy country folk, Christians, and we persist to this day.

When we took a long car trip out west, we carried a box of gospel tracts titled “The Wages Of Sin Is Death,” which we rolled up and wrapped in gold cellophane and threw out the window at rural mailboxes for people to read and be converted to Christianity but Dad drove very fast through North Dakota and Montana so as to avoid the expense of an extra night in a motel for six kids and two adults and this made accurate bombing impossible and it dawned on me that Christianity is the prevalent belief in that part of the country, the Buddhist population of North Dakota is rather slight, and so I gave up evangelism though other Keillors persist.

On Saturday I went to a Lutheran funeral in St. Peter for a dear childhood friend and we stood around the grave and sang a cappella “How Great Thou Art” and “Till We Meet Again” in Mary Lee’s memory, and I remembered the last time I saw her in St. Peter when she told me a story she’d heard me tell on the radio about a hundred-pound stone plaque that fell off the façade of a building almost hitting Bud Mueller, who had just stopped and turned because Mrs. Burkert mistook him for her daughter Donna’s boyfriend Merle. Mistaken identity saved his life. So when Merle was killed in a car crash, Bud married Donna and did his best to make her happy. I had forgotten the story and Mary Lee remembered it.

I once saw an MRI of my brain and the damage a couple strokes did to it but I still remember her and her sister Margie singing duets and I remember my boyhood home, the big garden out back, the old dog who guarded it against raccoons. We had hundreds of jars of canned food from the garden in shelves in the laundry room so we seldom needed a can opener, you just pried the Kerr lid off the Ball jar and there was the corn and green beans. And Saturday night I could hear the two of them singing, “By his counsels, guide, uphold you, with his sheep securely fold you,” and their mother, Leila, at the piano. A good memory to go to sleep on.

The story of my life:  revised version

I’ve bought many copies of Mary Oliver’s poems, Devotions, and on Friday I gave away the last so now I’m ordering more. I gave it to a friend whose description of brushing his dogs’ teeth reminded me of Oliver’s description of a grasshopper sitting in her hand and eating sugar, the jaws moving side to side, not up and down.

He said he uses a finger pad with bristles and a beef-flavored toothpaste and the dogs tolerate it well and the brushing spares them dental miseries so it made sense. Oliver carefully describes the grasshopper chewing and washing its face and flying away and then —

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention …
how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Paying attention is what Oliver does in her poetry, it’s what her poems are about, walking out in the natural world and seeing what’s there. Unlike most poets working today, she doesn’t write about her own troubles. She writes:

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on …
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination.

I came across an Oliveresque passage in a journal of mine from when I was 12, standing one September evening after dishes were done, behind our house, under my dad’s apple trees, and my mother at the piano playing “Abide with me” and I wrote:

Abide with me, another autumn day.
Night falls, the sky fills with the Milky Way.
An old piano, golden apples and
Dishes are done, my dog’s nose in my hand.

It’s a sweet little souvenir of a September evening in 1954, north of Minneapolis, and a boy wanting to preserve the wonder of concurrence, the hymn, the stars, the apples, the dog’s cold wet nose. He declined to draw any conclusion or to bring himself into the poem. Below the poem he notes that the word “racecar” is the same forward or backward.

Years later, I’m sitting in a steakhouse, hearing about brushing dogs’ teeth and thinking about Mary Oliver’s grasshopper while ten feet away eight drunks in their twenties sit around a table, having a wonderful time being stupid and very loud.

I don’t think I’ve been loud often in my life, but I’ve certainly been stupid. Once I got myself a cabin in the woods of Wisconsin with a separate workroom, 10x15, on stilts, with a stove and a big window looking into the trees, no house or road in sight. I sat at a table looking out the window and it was startling, when a deer walked out of the underbrush or a bird flew by. Shocking once, when a porcupine stopped and looked up at me.

I am not Mary Oliver, however, and don’t have the patience to think about a porcupine and design a poem around him (or her, I also don’t recognize gender except for deer), and I am not a birdwatcher. I was working on a book, The Book of Guys, and none of the guys was a hunter or hermit or forest ranger. And after a year I concluded that peace and quiet made me uneasy. A porcupine is interesting for a few minutes and maybe if I were looking up at the stars and smelling apples as someone played the piano and a porcupine put his nose in my hand, I could get a poem out of it, but poetry isn’t my line. Sorry, I’m a money writer.

And then I met my friend who became my lover and she was a New Yorker and I abandoned the cabin and workroom and we married in 1995. She is a daily walker but prefers Central Park with its great variety of humanity. Out of mistakes comes happiness. We gain good judgment by exercising bad. Had I made the enormous mistake of buying myself a dog, I might’ve been comfortable in isolation and I’d still be there today, a cranky bachelor, unvaccinated, not brushing its teeth or my own, listening to Fox, with twenty “Keep Out” signs posted, a pile of hundreds of empty Jack Daniels bottles, and a couple of loaded AK-47s by the door. I much prefer talking to you than listening for intruders. Thank you for that.

Women: don't read this, for men only

Maybe it’s just me but I have a nagging feeling that my gender, which once was fairly successful — Jonas Salk, Saul Bellow, Lowell Thomas, Tom Jones, the list goes on — is sagging and sinking, uncertain about changing norms of behavior, and we don’t whoop and holler the way we used to, and what this predicts for our species is not good. Geneticists are talking about the need to establish testosterone banks so that future males will be able to produce sperm and deliver it where needed, never mind earning a living or playing ice hockey.

Women, who have always been in charge of social life, are now openly wielding power, outlining goals and purposes, establishing spending limits, deciding what color the sheets and tablecloths should be. Men’s clubs like the Masons and Elk and Moose are a faint shadow of themselves except perhaps in parts of South Dakota while women are reforming the culture to their liking, and in my men’s group, the WBA (Wounded Buffalo Assn.), we discuss how, when we’re in a mixed group, women do most of the talking and men toss in the occasional nod or shrug or “I suppose so.” Back in olden times, women occupied the kitchen and talked about children, neighbors, ancestors, people at church, and men occupied the living room and talked about ideology. Now the two have merged and people are vastly more interesting than ideology, so men sit silent, dehorsed.

Last weekend my wife and I were visited by Lytton and Libby and Libby’s cousin Donna and the three women went off in a burst of happy chatter and had a fabulous day together seeing art galleries and a botanical garden and historical sites and we two men spent the day in separate rooms working silently on our laptops. This seems to be the pattern of things.

Men read the wrong books and get educated in the wrong subjects.

Graphs show clearly the dramatic increases in the percentage of women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math — the cheerful, hopeful, rational, progressive realms of knowledge — and women have now achieved equity in law school enrollment, the study of troublemaking, but too many men are enrolled in the humanities, which is the study of man’s inhumanity, and this is our problem. We’re reading too much history and literature and taking depressing courses in the social sciences. Too many men go into the arts, hoping to meet nice women, but the failure rate in the arts generally is about 95 percent, a dismal fact.

This idea, that higher education has been bad for men, occurred to me last week when I arrived in Minneapolis and met two very happy men, one was a cabdriver who was following the instructions of the GPS lady and the other was working in a Dairy Queen, making Blizzards, and I ordered a medium Butterfinger Blizzard and I heard him singing to himself as he whipped the candy chips into the ice milk, something I never hear men do who have a Ph.D. in history. History is a terrible field for men and should be avoided at all costs.

History is the study of slimeballs and what good does this do a young man, to realize that for centuries our gender has been a blight upon the world? I majored in English, which is almost as useless as history: you read the novels of Thomas Hardy and you’ll want to live alone in a cabin in the woods and take up beekeeping and never talk to another human being. My brother was an engineer, a cheerful field of rational problem-solving, and I was an English major, which gives you no useful knowledge, only a superior attitude. If English Departments were shut down and their students given jobs driving cabs and given the classics to read while they wait for fares, this would be a step forward.

My grandson is enrolled in architecture, and is very happy about it, and I’ve told him that if he switches to Humanities, I will disown him. I made a career writing fiction but if I had it to do over again, I’d get a job in the field of desserts. I still could. My cousin Ben, a retired car salesman, bakes cherry pies and I’ve never heard anyone say a bad word about him. I talk to him regularly, always about people we know, never ideology, and he is the cream of the Keillor crop.

A walk in the park on a historic day

Saturday morning, walking around south Minneapolis, a neighborhood where, back in my youth, when your elders start neglecting their lawn, you might move them out of the bungalow and plant them here in a one-BR apt. until they can no longer climb stairs and then there’d be a family meeting — shoot them? Or plunk them in the nursing home? — and off to Happy Acres they go, worn out since elliptical machines didn’t exist back then and there were no trainers except animal trainers.

And now it’s a neighborhood of 21-year-olds as you can see from the corner grocery, which is all bags of snacks and soda pop and frozen pizzas. Youth can survive on silage, if necessary. Young women walk their dogs at 8 a.m. and a man sleeps on a bus stop bench, a suitcase beside him. The apartment buildings all post For Rent signs, some offer deals, some have roommates waiting.

I walk around, awestruck at the courage of the young. You come to the city from Aitkin or Brainerd or Cottonwood and either you get a job waiting on table and maybe salt away some dough or you go to school and rack up piles of debt, or maybe you do both and work 15-hour days and all in hopes of making a good life, whatever that might mean in your case.

I worked in a scullery near here when I was 18, the summer before college, working the dishwasher at a hotel, and since I planned to be a writer, I walked around Loring Park on my break, thinking profound thoughts, practicing smoking Pall Malls, exhaling in an artistic manner. I was raised fundamentalist and left home to go to the U in September where I made Jewish friends and saw ballet and smoked in class and listened to long-haired radicals orate on the Mall and wrote incomprehensible poetry and had a big time.

A young woman approached and I wish I could ask her what it’s like to be her in 2021 but she has a large dog on a leash who probably is trained to fend off the curious, so I pass by, averting my eyes, but I wish her well. I wish them all well, even as I worry they’ll trip on the same old pitfalls I did and become social climbers and show-offs or time-wasters and drifters. I also worry they’ll get stuck in a dead-end job with a dope for a boss and be disincentivized to break free.

It was a historic day, Saturday. It was September 11, though maybe the kids in the neighborhood don’t recall it so clearly as we elders do, a day on which the towers fell and the country suddenly was united, conservative and liberal and indifferent, old and young, city and small town and rural, when the city of New York showed heroic kindness and courage among strangers and a day later people gathered with lit candles outside their buildings and sang “America” and “God Bless America” and meant every word. Then, unaccountably, our leaders set out to make the Middle East into an American democracy and instead we became more like Afghanistan, a tribal culture, warlords vying for power, but that chapter is now at an end. Let angry old men fight over the wreckage for another year or two, but eventually the young will prevail.

The young woman walking her dog passed and I wondered what her thoughts about the day might be and I almost asked, but she was wearing a COVID mask and the dog looked at me warily, so I didn’t. When we were, briefly, twenty years ago, a united people, you could feel the spirit in the streets and people spoke easily to each other. The terrorists didn’t terrorize us, they emboldened us to love each other and to worry about the young who will inherit what we’ve badly botched up. Signs and portents abound, if only we will look up from our feet. The young are passionate about the environment and climate change. There are millions of people who cannot imagine modifying their sumptuous lifestyle in the interest of conservation in behalf of future generations and the habitability of the earth — they would rather die than do that and as soon as they do die, the world will take a step forward.