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
The Supreme Court is taking up the case of right-wing Christian parents who don’t want their schoolkids to be assigned to read storybooks in which gay persons are portrayed as normal, which reminds me of my childhood when my parents wrote to school asking that, for religious reasons, I be excused from gym class for the unit on dancing. So for two weeks, while other students did square dancing and ballroom in the gym, I sat in study hall and did my lessons.
As I recall, it was no big deal. I didn’t feel odd or set apart or estranged. I snuck off to some school dances and found that dancing to Little Richard, the Coasters, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, was pretty free-form, not the waltz or foxtrot or mambo they taught in gym. I saw no moral wrong in bopping around on the dance floor with a girl. I was 17 and becoming my own person.
Read MoreI stayed in an old hotel in Northampton, Mass., last week, one with a glass U.S. Mail chute running from the top floor to the lobby, a sweet reminder of olden times when guests might’ve sat at a desk in their hotel room and written letters with fountain pens on hotel stationery to friends or relatives, but now people text those messages so no letters fluttered down the chute and there it is, one more useless artifact just like you and I will be someday if we aren’t already.
I’m not nostalgic. I’m quite aware that back in those fountain pen days plenty of people were conking out from the congenital heart defect that Mayo surgeons fixed very nicely and also from strokes that anti-seizure meds prevent and I also know that people we call “special needs” were miserably treated as cattle and now a growing army of teachers and therapists are dedicated to creating humane programs to enable them to grow and thrive and live good lives. We have one in our family and her happiness makes me happy; I hear her talk about her busy day and her job and her friends and I say, “God bless America for its goodness to humans who could easily be shoved to the side.”
Read MoreI’m fond of progress. We used to drive around with a big road map spread out and yell, “I told you to turn west a half mile ago, ya dummy,” and now a robolady is our navigator directing us in gentle tones and road trips are more enjoyable. I make impulsive phone calls to distant friends as Alexa is guiding us through Connecticut and say, “Hi, Marcia, how’s it going?” and due to bandwidth or magnetic resonance or the Earth’s rotation, I know I won’t get a bill for $85 from AT&T. This is still a source of wonder to an old coot like me.
And instead of having a back seat full of encyclopedias and atlases and dictionaries, I just google “Hartford” and read about its history.
Read MoreI grew up fundamentalist so we didn’t do Easter and our little girls didn’t get bright new pastel jackets and lace bonnets and white gloves because we celebrated Christ’s resurrection all year round, not only in April, but now I’m Episcopalian and so I find fresh flowers in church and a buoyant mood, the hymns are of a hallelujah nature, the pews are packed, and during the Exchange of Peace when we usually shake hands, there may be some hugging. Sanctified Brethren were not huggers. We thought it might lead to dancing.
You can take the boy out of the Brethren but you can’t take the Brethren out of the boy and sometimes my wife looks at me and says, “Please smile” and I do but only for a moment. I go through life with the demeanor of a pallbearer and I’m almost 83. There are very few photographs of me smiling and the smiles strike me as forced. Inside, I’m generally rather happy or at least content, I love this woman, am grateful for my life, which has been elongated by open-heart surgery (thank you, Dr. Orszulak and Dr. Dearani) and anti-seizure meds and blood thinner, enjoy my work, am glad that I long ago quit smoking and drinking and gave up golf. But I look like a man whose dog died, though I haven’t had a dog for fifty years. Dogs are wary of me, probably feeling I will chastise them for their iniquities.
Read MoreThe family took the subway downtown to a dance performance as a favor to the one dance fan in our midst and she thanked us for it afterward. “Thank you for indulging me, I really loved this,” she said. People ought to do that more often. Me, for one. My wife and daughter leave the apartment for hours, leaving me to work in silence. It seems awkward to say, “Thank you for going away,” so I don’t.
I didn’t care for the modernist pieces on the program, the rattly shrieky unmelodic music, the grievous angular movements suggesting despair and panic. The Dow Jones had been crashing all day and I was imagining the three of us losing the apartment and having to sleep in the bus depot so I was more in the mood for tap dancing and tangos, dancing less attitudinal, more aspirational. But the subway ride was worth it.
Read MoreI lay on a table 95% naked last month while my dermatologist Allison examined me for growths and blemishes that might need to be snipped off and biopsied and as she did so, she told me that she had been a fan of my radio show in her childhood and she was curious about a song I once sang, “I ride an old paint, I lead an old dan, I’m going to Montana to throw the hoolihan,” and was curious about the meaning of “old paint,” “old dan,” and “hoolihan,” and had I written the song myself.
This is the sort of thing that makes a man grateful to have gone into broadcasting years ago. I took a radio job in order to come in out of the cold — it was Minnesota, I was a parking lot attendant at a huge lot on the Mississippi bluff — but here I was, almost naked, explaining a traditional cowboy song to a doctor, a free exchange of information. Life is good.
Read MoreI dropped my glasses in a café in New York and couldn’t find them and a young man got down on his knees and got them out from under a table. I thanked him, but it wasn’t enough. I said, “I really appreciate good manners more than I ever used to.” He said, “I know what you mean.”
There’s a lot of ugliness going around. I’ve never been called “scum” or “sleazebag” that I’m aware of though motorists do sometimes curse us slow pedestrians in rough tones but now that national leadership has embraced these particular terms I suppose the day is coming when TSA personnel will feel free (“Is that your briefcase, white trash?” “Hold your hands over your head, buttface, and stand very still.”) and give us a full-body patdown if we object. Security as an excuse for ugly manners, we’ve seen it before.
Read MoreWe seem to be in a war against science and research, which is causing anxiety among us geezers grateful for anti-seizure meds that guard against us suddenly shaking uncontrollably on the street corner and strangers having to remember first aid from 4-H to keep us from strangling on a hot dog and when we’re not reading about that, we see news of low-frequency seismic waves that can travel for hundreds of miles underground and cause tall brick buildings to crash to the ground, which is disturbing to us in Manhattan, and then there’s news of Mr. and Mrs. JD Vance who announced their trip to Greenland to see the dogsled races only to be told, “Nobody invited you,” so they flew to the U.S. military base at Pituffik for three hours and Mr. Vance announced that Greenland needed American defense whether it wanted it or not. He did not change the name of the area to Pitiful.
An interesting time we live in. And Wisconsin elected a Supreme Court judge other than the one Elon Musk favored and offered large sums of money to voters in a bid for a win.
Read MoreI went to the Met recently to see Beethoven’s “Fidelio” and hang out with 3,800 very well-dressed patrons to see a passionate story about political tyranny but mainly to see the soprano Lise Davidsen who is worth the price of admission and more, especially when surrounded by the Met chorus, mostly men, imprisoned for political crimes but nonetheless in gorgeous voice. As for Lise, architects have designed enormous opera houses and finally they’ve designed a singer whose voice fills it so you feel it even in the cheaper seats.
I like “Fidelio” because it’s Beethoven so it’s got soul and also the story is simple, there aren’t a lot of counts and countesses to keep track of or Wagnerian goddesses, and I think German sings better than Italian, it sounds more like my kind of folks. It has warmth. And there’s no need to bother with the English subtitles: Leonore dresses up as a man so she can rescue her guy Florestan from being hanged. That’s all you need to know. There’s some growling and hollering by some basses and baritones and there’s a kerfuffle with another soprano but when the 6’2” Leonore comes onstage you know you’re at an opera and you know what’s up. The tenor is going to be strangled if the soprano doesn’t save him. And when she strides across the stage and lets fly with that powerful loving tone that stuns even the brass section, you know she’s up to the job. This is no Mimi or Madame Butterfly, this is a Norwegian lyric dramatic soprano who’s pregnant with twins and canceling her schedule to deliver them –– “Fidelio” is her finale until 2026, and here she is singing so gorgeously while carrying two embryonic people — sometimes you see her put a hand on her abdomen as if to say, “Stille, stille.” This is a woman to reckon with. I married a woman like her. So have other men. After Lise delivers the twins, I wish she’d take over the Democratic Party.
Read MoreIt is highly informative to watch another marriage in a moment of stress and see how calmly they handle it compared to the hysterics that I’d go through in similar circumstances: 6:20 a.m., a nephew and his wife are assembling their bags to catch a cab to the airport for a 9 a.m. flight and the guy suddenly can’t find his wallet and so the search begins, bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, as I stand watching in my pajamas — the two are guests in our apartment — and it amazes me how calm and cheerful they are. “Are you sure you saw it this morning?” she asks, matter-of-factly. “Yes, I’m sure,” he says and because he is a tech wizard, not a fiction writer, she takes him at his word.
I’ve been in his situation numerous times when I proceeded rapidly from mounting despair to self-loathing and having to be institutionalized in a locked ward and tranquilized, but this young couple doesn’t go there. The search proceeds. The wife makes a few helpful suggestions in a calm voice, no shrieking, no wild hand gestures. Minutes pass. No panic. The husband unzips a pocket on his knapsack and there is the wallet. All is well. No divorce lawyer got involved, no therapist, priest, or psychic.
Read More