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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.

The story of my life, in 750 words

I was having a hard time falling asleep the other night because I’d thought of something that I was afraid of forgetting if I fell asleep, which was keeping me awake, not that it was the sort of timeless thing you see printed on coffee cups sold in bookstores, like “Hope is the thing with feathers” or the one Thoreau said about confidently pursuing your dreams, which now I forget the rest of.

Sleep is the great blessing of retirement, especially for someone like me — or is it “someone like myself”? I used to know this — someone who in his working years (so-called, in my case, because my work was talking and telling stories, no heavy lifting involved) — and I was crisscrossing time zones and going from EST to PST I’d be awake at 1 and 2 with a plane to catch at 7 so I could make it to a benefit in New York for Rich People Who Wish To Help Poor People Without Having To Be In Physical Contact With Them and I couldn’t sleep on planes because of a fear of dying in a plane crash and, having been brought up evangelical, I wanted to be awake for my death so I could quickly repent for any unforgiven sins and make sure I’d go to heaven and meet Grandma and Grandpa and not go to hell and spend eternity with Stalin and Hitler.

I couldn’t tell anybody about my sleep disorder because my radio show was famous for its soporific benefits. I did a 15-minute monologue in the middle that had an amazing calming effect on people. Millions of CDs of the monologues were sold to people who never actually heard them and I won several Grammy Awards though the judges could not later recall what the monologues were about. I did the show in a theater and we closed off the balcony for fear someone might sleepwalk and fall over the railing and often the entire audience got caught up in slow rhythmic breathing, every eye closed, it was like a religious experience. My best monologue was a reminiscence of a drive across North Dakota, Dad at the wheel, we six kids in back, nobody talking, all of us watching for the mountains Mother said were just ahead. My blissful recollection of the drive had a powerful effect, so much so that I gave the monologue every Saturday for three months in a row and nobody noticed, not even the stagehands or the sound engineer. It is still used in sleep clinics around the country. I donate the royalties to the Apnea Foundation.

In retirement, as I say, my nocturnal life has blossomed into extensive dreams, pastoral epics in which I am a great sailor, an artist, a standup comic, a race car driver, a ballet dancer — dreams of competence and authority — and the other night (I am now getting back to what I started to say in the first paragraph) I dreamed that I had written a perfect limerick and in my dream I was afraid that if I fell asleep I’d forget it, but in my dream I was arguing with myself and thinking, “You’re awake” and the conflict, knowing that my sleep self was wrong, that I was sleeping, woke me up, and I sat down and wrote the limerick, about the famous podcaster Phoebe Judge, host of “Criminal,” which everyone except me (I?) has heard, but I refuse to hear podcasts because earbuds look funny on me, and the challenge was to not use the rhyme “heebie-jeebie.”

A girl who loves radio, Phoebe,
Has AM and FM and CB,
And plays them proudly,
Constantly, loudly,
At 370 dB,
And when she was caught
She fired a shot
At the cops with her personal BB,
And when she turned deaf
She shouted the F-
Word that’s not found in Mister White, E.B.

It is a perfect limerick, not that this is the solution to our national dilemmas, but the limerick is one enterprise in which perfection is possible, and that is why I keep returning to it. I look back at my life and I see a series of sinking ships and gunshot wounds in my feet, but “A girl who loves radio, Phoebe” is right up there with the five or six perfect ones I’ve written. This column is not perfect. It strikes me as somewhat disorganized and scattered, but, as I say so often, it is what it is. Someday I’ll write about that.

In defense of feeling good in perilous times  

I am thinking about moving to Texas so that I can be in open disagreement with the powers that be and express this freely, instead of living in colonies of liberal progressives where I must put tape over my mouth except when among close personal friends. Freedom of speech is watched closely where I live and we all know it. “What exactly is it you want to say that you can’t?” you wonder. It is something that, were I to say it, I’d be kicked out of the Democratic Party and my library card would be confiscated and I’d be barred from Amazon and Starbucks and the Episcopal church would make me sit in the Penitents’ Corner. So I’ll keep it to myself.

I grew up fundamentalist so I’m familiar with the drill. We couldn’t join marching band because we believed that rhythmic movement would lead to dancing, which then led to fornication. We never sang uptempo hymns, only dirges. Women kept silent in church because the sound of their voices would lead men to think impure thoughts. So the rigidity of progressive righteousness is familiar to me. I can live with it. I know which friends can be trusted and which cannot.

Anyway, it’s been lovely weather and my family is enjoying robust health and my novel is finished and we escaped from the nightmare of Ikea, a vast warehouse of a store designed by psychologists to disorient the shopper. It’s popular among liberals who wish they were Swedish, everything is tasteful, there is a great deal of whiteness, everything is white or natural wood, and I suppose if you live with Swedish furniture and tableware you feel less complicit in our shameful treatment of the disadvantaged and our corruption of the planet, but the place makes me insane, wandering lost through the puzzle of aisles, and, handsome though some of the furniture is, it requires self-assembly, which would drive me straight to the brink. A list of directions makes me look for a gin bottle.

Back home, I sit peaceably at a table under a painting of prairie skyscape, flat foreground, power lines, and a vast expanse of cloudy sky. I bought it at a gallery in St. Paul and it’s more and more appealing to me for reasons I can’t describe, which is true of great music, it is inexplicable and expands with time. Such as the Chopin piano études. I didn’t grow up on them, my mother played hymns on the piano, and back in my rocknroll days I looked on Chopin as music for social climbers, upper-class wallpaper, and now it speaks directly to me and not only the popular ones like “Tristesse” but all that I hear, which, thanks to YouTube, are at my fingertips. In its inimitable way, YouTube is likely to stick a commercial for weight-loss pills in the middle of an étude, but it matters not, this sickly Polish romantic offers an emotional bond that I seldom feel with songs of my own generation. They are souvenirs of a time past and I don’t need them.

I listen to Chopin and look at the woman sitting across the room and the music speaks of our years together, grievous times and strange episodes and endearment and harmony and all of it wrapped in love and kindness. The music passes between us without my having to say a word. If I were to write about our romance, it would be pale and self-serving compared to how Chopin treats it. The world rages around us and some people berate us for not being as angry as they are, but I sit here under the painted prairie while Chopin pours out his story, which is all the more powerful for having endured almost two centuries.

Great art endures and the souvenirs fade. Mary Oliver’s poem about the grasshopper who lies eating sugar in her hand, its jaws working back and forth, its enormous complicated eye gazing at her, and then spreads its wings and floats away: she writes, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” And James Wright’s poem about meeting the two Indian ponies in the meadow near Rochester, touching the long ear of one who has nuzzled his hand: he says, “Suddenly I realize that if I stepped out of my body I would break into blossom.”

If you look at the painted prairie, imagine the grasshopper in one hand and the pony’s ear brushing the other, while listening to Chopin, it makes for the launch of a beautiful day.

A modest proposal sure to be rejected

The sheer ferocity of Ida, high winds, buckets of rain, flash flooding in New York City Wednesday night, rivers and waterfalls in the subway, made millions of New Yorkers think about the advantages of settling in rural Minnesota, especially as more hurricanes, even more brutal than Ida, are forming over the climate-warmed water of the Atlantic. There is a limit to how much punishment people are willing to accept before they look around and consider greener pastures and meanwhile, in St. Paul, people thronged to the State Fair, devouring cheese curds and bratwursts, admiring the livestock and enjoying powerful centrifugal experiences. Facts are facts. If what it means to live in New York is to ride the subway into a waterfall, maybe it’s best to be less stressed in the Upper Midwest and instead of flooded tunnels and tornado funnels, take sanctuary on the prairie.

We have some snow here but it is not catastrophic. I speak from experience. Snow falls gently and does not harm anyone. When the Weather Service says, “Minnesota was hit by a blizzard,” the verb “hit” is fanciful, like being “struck” by a bluebird feather or being “attacked” by ants. When snow falls, we don’t hide under the bed, we don’t need powerful pumps, there are no dikes to prevent snowdrifts. We enjoy a blizzard, standing in the kitchen, drinking coffee, and we feel grateful for having teenagers in the family who will shovel the sidewalks. Bob Dylan shoveled snow, Amy Klobuchar, Jessica Lange, Prince, Jesse Ventura. It is a life-shaping experience.

When a city is flooded by tourists over a long period of time, as New York has been, they turn the place into a cartoon, and the last time I walked down to Little Italy, it was no more Italian than Domino’s Pizza or Venetian blinds or your aunt Florence. Nobody in Brooklyn speaks Brooklynese, it’s all gentrified. The press came down hard on Mets fans booing their team, one more sign that New York is turning into Seattle.

Americans enjoy having some foreignness around for variety and color and that’s what makes Texas appealing to so many people. You can freely enjoy peculiarities there that would make you an outcast elsewhere. For some reason, our Southern states tend to encourage the outlandish, which is why Mr. T moved to Palm Beach: he fits right in. New Orleans puts on Mardi Gras for guys who like to wear wigs and feathers and high heels. A country needs to maintain places where standards of normality are fairly loose. Sturgis, S.D., for example. Cambridge, Mass.

Minnesota never had a French Quarter and the French persons I know who’ve come to visit didn’t seem interested in starting one, but we’re in need of diversity and when the State Fair ends in a few days, I propose turning the Fair’s grounds into a Persian Quarter and resettling some of our Afghan allies there who are floating around, looking for a home. The grounds are unused except for ten days a year, a neighborhood with streets, barns, arenas, shops, parking lots, all it needs are houses. In the Persian Quarter, the refugees could re-create what they love of their culture, and Americans weary of the Walmarts and work cubicles could travel abroad in St. Paul and find exotic style and fabulous cooking. Resettlement could be redemptive, showing that the bearded bullies with ammo belts don’t represent the best of a people. Art and learning do, and folk tradition, and the bonds of language, the food, the music and poetry. Leave religion to personal preference and enjoy the rest.

New Yorkers saw horrendous scenes of subway tunnels turned into raging rivers, trains pulling into the 28th Street station under a Niagara of water, passengers dashing to safety. We don’t have that in Minnesota. Summers are quite pleasant here except for an occasional tornado. The culture is predominantly northern European, white, judgmental, and we’re eager to escape that and New Yorkers would be welcomed here. We tend to be soft-spoken, self-deprecating, compulsively passive, and I know of numerous New Yorkers who’ve found happiness here. Their honk and brassiness are admired here. Back home they were nogoodniks and here they’re heroes. It’s a big country. Check it out.