Columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
Now and then as He sees fit, the Lord drops us into an interesting situation to make sure we’re paying attention and a week ago Friday night, having begun a stand-up comedy tour in Bend, Oregon, to a full house and a standing O, I awoke in Carson City, Nevada, with a bump on my head, unable to move my left arm and my face was scratched and my left shin hurt.
No, I hadn’t been drinking; old age is excitement enough, no need for intoxicants, I set the bottle aside twenty years ago. My best guess was that I’d had a seizure — I’m 83 and on anti-seizure meds after a stroke, maybe two, and probably I tumbled out of bed and crashed into something, a bedside table, but had no memory of it, not a sliver. I went back to sleep.
Read MoreA Times story reporting that college students in a writing course do better when they go offline for a month makes perfect sense to me, same as if you say a writer does better at a laptop in the public library than shnockered on a sailboat in a storm, but the idea of persuading students to go offline strikes me as quixotic, like Amish evangelism or banning the use of chairs. The internet is here and we’re all caught up in it.
l was in my 50s when the World Wide Web came in. Its advent was not a big event to me; I was still working on a manual Underwood typewriter. I have a clearer memory of seeing Albert Woolson, the last living Civil War veteran, in a parade in downtown Minneapolis. I remember my uncle Jim farming with horses and Fibber McGee and Molly on the radio. And I remember boredom, which has mostly disappeared in America except perhaps among lighthouse keepers or attendants in parking ramps or felons in solitary confinement. And maybe imprisonment offline would be considered cruel and inhumane in a court of law.
Read MoreThe world comes to an end and the world keeps on going. Life is a series of sinking ships but still people go sailing as if it hadn’t happened. Disaster strikes and people wake up the next morning and have breakfast.
I took a cab to JFK, which thus far has not been renamed Trump Kennedy Airport, and boarded a plane to Seattle, six hours over the Great Lakes (soon to be renamed Greatest Lakes) and the northern plains (Nowheresville) and the Rockies, and thanks to Wi-Fi I could watch CNN and see that the America we learned about in high school, a bastion of freedom, a bulwark against tyranny, a beacon of human rights and individual dignity, is not shared by our own government. There was Stephen Miller, the Secretary of Anger, yelling at Jake Tapper as if he had no right to question the current foreign policy of Whatever We Want Whenever We Wish and that, by God, America has a right to take Greenland by force if necessary and Tapper looked dumbfounded. It was like confronting someone on the street yelling that he is God’s envoy so get off the sidewalk and let me through. You’d look for a cop to take the poor soul to a safe place.
Read MoreWe stood at the window, my love and I, and heard the fireworks whomping and racketing away over Times Square at precisely midnight last Wednesday, as 2026 arrived and like many people my age I thought about aging — in sixteen years, Lord willing, I’ll be 100, which is astonishing; I’ve been avoiding exercise all my life. Meanwhile, the city was swearing in a new mayor, 34, born in Uganda to a Muslim father and Hindu mother, an immigrant at the age of seven, running as a Democratic Socialist, Zohran Mamdani. It appears that we Episcopalians’ grip on authority may be sort of fragile.
New York is the city to live in if you don’t have the time and dough to travel all over the world, just get an apartment here and use public transportation and walk in the parks. My love walked for a few miles around Central Park recently and heard a good deal of French, Arabic, several African languages, some Swedish, Spanish, and here and there some English. I read somewhere that eighty languages are spoken by students in the public schools.
Read MoreSome 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.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreI 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.
Read MoreI’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.”
Read MoreThere 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.
Read MoreI 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?
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