Gearing up to go on the road

Some days I glance at the front page and see the name RUMP in three or four places so I flip back to the Lifestyle section and maybe find a wine review, “Fresh and vivacious with chewy tannins and bursts of flowers and fruits.” The deranged man with cognitive problems is a passing phenom, but bursts of flowers and fruits have been with us forever and even in January here in Manhattan one can find shops to walk into and feel flowers bursting around you and markets where you inhale the freshness of mounds of apples and pears and oranges.

The old king who goes mad is a character out of Shakespeare, he has no place in America, you walk out of a performance of King Lear and buy a bouquet of tulips and a bag of apples and you’re back to reality. When Van Gogh admitted himself to the asylum for the insane at Saint-Rémy in Provence, he spent the last years of his life painting the gardens and woods, the trees and flowers, paintings that were the finest of his life. He could’ve been destructive, set fires, broken windows, preyed on the weak and helpless, but he did not, he found solace in painting. This is the difference between an artist and a creep.

The blessing of Christmas pickles

The Christmas blues hit me early this year, right around 10 p.m. on the 24th in church. The readings from Scripture were good and we sang Schubert’s beautiful Sanctus and various well-loved carols and then the sermon was just an expulsion of air. But the long walk home in the dark was good for the spirit, the city lights, the shops closed so there was no infernal Christmas music about jingling bells, holly, snowmen, sleigh, and when I got home I got out a fresh jar of dill pickles, which I find can be good at interrupting the blues if caught in its early stages.

My mother made dill pickles with cucumbers fresh from our garden and pickles from Zabar’s Deli remind me of hers. And remind me of her love of Christmas — to her, a chance to be cheerful and generous despite the sorrows of this world. A picture of her and her siblings hangs on our wall, nine girls, three boys, minus little Dorothy and her mother who died of scarlet fever. But Mother loved this day in the circle of family. So ours turned out well.

The simple gifts of Christmas

I have managed to keep my Trump Derangement Syndrome under control recently by singing Christmas carols with audiences at the Christmas shows I’ve done, shows that are open to the general public, not only the deranged, and when they sing, a cappella, “Away in a manger, no crib for a bed, the little Lord Jesus lay down His sweet head. The stars in the sky looked down where He lay, the little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay,” everything else disappears except the wonderment at how good a couple thousand people sound while singing a carol they’ve known since childhood.

A great many famous artists have tortured that carol, trying to make it a vehicle for their particular virtuosity and view of life, but when I hum a note and sing the words “Away in a” and am silent, the American people pick it up and make it the exquisite tender harmonious lullaby it is and they will also do The cattle are lowing, the Baby awakes, but little Lord Jesus no crying He makes. I’ve heard this in dozens of cities and it’s always the same ethereal sound. Dim light helps, pitch-blackness even better. Maybe it’s somewhat stronger in the South and Midwest or in small towns. A Utah crowd with a strong Mormon element, the beauty will bring you to tears. In New York, the audience hesitates, they need to put their fine sense of irony away, but eventually they go along with it.

Returning to a generous place

I’m an old man and the ease of email and texting is a marvel to me, more so than to you kids, until I notice the time I spend daily erasing emails and texts from various noble causes and Nancy Pelosi and AOC and other Democrats asking for money, which I don’t even read, the first few words, “I’m sorry to bother you” or “This is important” or “Please don’t erase,” tell me what’s up, so I click on the trashcan icon and they’re gone. But it takes a lot of time. I probably could’ve finished reading Moby-Dick in the time it takes, if I wanted to, which I don’t. But anyway.

I marvel at using my cellphone as a video camera. I’m on tour in December and I record Heather Masse and me singing, “I’m lonesome for my precious children, they live so far away,” in sweet duet and send it to my daughter along with me telling the joke, “How do chickens pick their noses? With chicken fingers.”

An afternoon at the library

There are so many advantages to being an old man that I wonder why I put it off so long and one is that the Proust Reading Group has stopped inviting me to join and another is the number of dreadful stories in the news that for a man my age come under the heading “Not My Problem” such as the shortage of goods due to shipping backlogs, freighters lined up for miles waiting to unload in ports, people unable to find what they need. I have the opposite problem: too much stuff, need a ship to come up the Hudson River to 96th Street and haul it away. We have twenty fancy dinner plates though we live in a two-bedroom apartment and the days of grand dinner parties are far in the past. She and I now form a majority. Four is a family, six is a crowd.

I chose the right parents, evangelicals, so, yes, I am haunted by guilt and regret, but on the other hand, there was no fetal alcohol syndrome and for a kid who aims to be a writer, the King James is excellent tutelage, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Isaiah, beat out Disney characters and crime novels. My grandfathers died young, at 73, of hard work and so I avoided hard work and already I’m a decade ahead of them. This is a lucky upbringing. Not privilege, luck. Privilege is having a car and driver waiting for you and luck is when you go down the steps to the subway station and the train comes just as you go through the turnstile and you walk across the platform just as the train stops and the doors open, which makes your entire day up to that point feel perfectly timed. I take the train to the public library reference room and the long tables with the green study lamps and I plug in my laptop and sit among ambitious young men and women, most of them Asian, and my ambition is gone gone gone, praise the Lord, I’m free of it, I’m here for pleasure.

Back home in Minnesota

I flew to Minnesota on Wednesday where it was below zero, but never mind that, I’m a happy man, I’m in love, I have work to do, and it felt good to descend down low over the Minnesota River and onto the tarmac of MSP and roll to a stop.

I was in Minnesota to rehearse a Christmas show. But once again the Great Intruder had seized our attention by setting off another stink bomb, which is hard to ignore. It is Advent, with the beautiful mystery of the child in the stable and the beloved carols and the story we know so well, and then an old man in bright yellow golf pants walks into church with a bucket of dog turds. Where are the ushers?

Thinking ahead to Christmas

I went to Macy’s on 34th Street last week, my first visit to a classic old-fashioned department store in many years, and took my daughter along so she could see what it is, like taking her to see a ranch with cowboys or a printing plant with Linotype machines or dirt-track racing or Amish harvesting oats with scythes. The store was bustling, all eleven floors, and what struck me was the friendly alertness of the employees and how smartly they could direct us to what we were looking for. This was two days after the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade down Fifth Avenue and many of them had likely marched in it with the giant balloons and here they were bright and eager, directing us to Men’s Dress Shirts on five and socks on four and pens on nine.

And then there was the thrill of riding on one of the store’s century-old wooden escalators — some of the very few still in use in the world.

My Thanksgiving visitors

I am thankful that Thanksgiving is over and the stupor of carbohydrates and tryptophan and I think back and ask myself, “Why? Why in heaven’s name did I walk over to the buffet and help myself to seconds?” As Socrates said, the secret of happiness lies in learning to enjoy less. So next year I plan to celebrate the day with a bowl of chicken soup and a few saltines.

In 2026 I intend to eat moderately, resume regular exercise, speak kindly, patch up old hostilities, and clean up the stacks of trash that obscure my desk so that I am now writing this on the kitchen table.

On the road looking for history

I paid a visit to the magnificent state of Colorado last week to commune with the spirit of my great-great-grandfather David Powell who spent some time there in the mid-19th century. He was a Pennsylvania farmer who married his sweetheart Martha Ann Cox and dreamed of getting off the farm and seeing the West, but they had triplets and then more babies, one after another.

His erotic enthusiasm was defeating his spirit of adventure until, in a fit of resolution, he packed the family in a wagon with a milk cow tied to the rear and in a series of hops, to Michigan, then Illinois, Iowa, made it to Missouri where Martha Ann informed him that she was done traveling. She would not take small children into Indian territory. And so he kissed her goodbye and headed for Colorado with a wagon and team. I rode up the highway in the twisting Colorado River canyon under the monumental snow-capped peaks and could imagine how awestruck a farmer must’ve been at so much grandeur. He made it to Fort Collins and found no gold there and then got to Denver where all the available land had been claimed so he gave up on the idea of getting rich and went into politics instead. Back then it was not easy to do both at the same time.

A Prairie Home Companion Christmas Program

A Prairie Home Companion 50th Anniversary Tour Program – Nashville, TN and Manhattan, KS