I can’t help it, I’m a happy man

I like being old. When you reach your eighties you finally get to say what you think and people will listen and not interrupt even if they know you’re wrong. Being wrong is a privilege of old age. So shut up and listen and don’t contradict me.

My speech to the Class of 2026

I was chosen to speak at your graduation because I am phenomenally successful, America’s favorite columnist, a best-selling author, winner of countless awards, in demand as a speaker, a frequent consultant to the Vatican, the Pentagon, the U.N., and CNN, and it’s all because I was not bright enough to go into a technological field — my math skill ended with the multiplication of fractions — so instead I majored in English and read Melville and Henry James and the Brontës, which prepared me for a career in baggage handling, but now A.I. has come along and changed everything to my advantage. A.I. is an ace with numbers and it is El Estúpido when it comes to language.

On the road in the Snake Canyon

I sat in a bookstore in Enterprise, Oregon, Thursday morning and had coffee with four men my age, all Enterprise residents, an accidental coffee klatch due to my wandering around town waiting for a breakfast café to open and seeing a book in the bookstore window by my friend the poet Jim Harrison and I went in and smelled coffee and there were the four gents around a table and they offered me a chair and I sat down and they asked where I’m from and I said, “New York City” and that is all you need to start a good conversation.

The man at the typewriter goes clickety wham bam

Have I told you about the bad fall I took one morning a few weeks ago coming out of a breakfast café in Chicago, a café called Nookies, the morning after a show I did there? I have? Are you sure? I was coming out the door and there was a step down, which turned out to be two steps down and I crashed down on my right hip and right arm and two guys stopped and hauled me to my feet. I think what caused it was the fact it was the best breakfast I’d had in a long time. You go on tour and unless you’re Paul Simon or Bob Dylan, you stay at economy motels that serve a free breakfast of scrambled eggs that comes in tanker trucks from Hoboken and has nothing to do with chickens, it’s made from sawdust and cornstarch and recycled cellophane. This breakfast was one you’d serve to Paul Simon. Bob Dylan wrote hundreds of songs about being mistreated and misunderstood but when it comes to breakfast, he does not put up with sawdust and cornstarch.

Score one for the cowboys

The old man I knew when I was a kid was my Grandpa Denham who was irritable and not tolerant of playfulness and sat at Sunday dinner and was not amused if one of us kids spoke up — it was our house, he was a guest, we felt entitled to speak — so I imagined I’d wind up cranky like him and now I’m ten years older than Grandpa and I don’t feel it happening. He was a bookkeeper for the Soo Line Railroad and I did a radio show and maybe that’s the difference though I knew plenty of unpleasant people in radio because I was in public radio where folks take their pretensions very seriously and I was in the comedy business, which made me a rube in their eyes. Nonetheless I had a good time and now I feel rather lighthearted, even naively so.

Last Wednesday I flew from JFK to LAX and the plane sat on the runway for two hours while a thunderstorm passed and it didn’t bother me in the least. I sat and worked on a new book, which I think is the best thing I’ve ever done, which surely can’t be true, but I read a few paragraphs and think, “This is what Proust wished he could do but his English wasn’t up to the job.”

Summer is here and what could be better?

I am very fond of my current age, the age at which I no longer recognize the names of famous celebrities and when I go to YouTube to hear the songs of my youth I see commercials for walkers and stool softeners — and of the classmates who stood in our blue gowns on the football field that June day and were urged to go make the world a better place, a majority have slipped away into the hereafter.

And yet certain glories are more glorious than ever. A summer day, for one. I took summer for granted in my casual youth and now, grinding away at work all morning at my desk, I step outside into a Manhattan heaven, festive cliff dwellers stream through Central Park, the city is golden, and an old achy man feels it in his soul because today he skipped the newspaper, which is a catalog of decline, despair, and dereliction, and he is getting bulletins from the passing crowd that Americans are as free and brave as ever.

I hear the drumming of somebody coming

Every morning when I swing my legs out of bed and stand erect and think a clear thought, which is: Thank you, dear Lord, for this day, and I insert my hearing aids and switch them on using an app on my phone and thus gain access to spoken English, this magnificent language of my people that emerged from our defeat in 1066 to the Normans, which then enriched our blunt Teutonic tongue with words such as literature and music and passion and coffee, all of which are part of my day, and I think, “I am 83 and truly this is the happiest time of my life, it simply is so, and so don’t deny it,” but then I try to find something worrisome such as the dog I saw in Central Park with a thing in its mouth like what babies suck on, which I racked my brain trying to think of the name for and had to google on my phone to find it — pacifier — which led to thinking about Cognitive Decline Due To Aging and the billion-dollar industry in beverages and supplements that claim to delay decline and Decline, my dears, is an idea that once planted in the brain is not easily dispelled, it stays with you as you amble to the kitchen and take your meds and pour a cup of coffee and you have to sit down and get a grip on yourself and get your head on straight.

I left St. Paul ten years ago and moved to New York. I was a big shot in St. Paul and in New York I am squeezed into the C train along with everyone else. My wife loves New York and is happy here, and living with a happy woman is much much more important than being a big shot. I’ve started a new career as a stand-up comic and it’s great fun to amuse people, most of whom, due to their taking citizenship seriously, lack goofiness in their lives.

Dancing in Chelsea with Willy and Dylan

I’ve just had an amazing weekend in New York, which is what people come to New York for, to experience life in ways they didn’t find likely in Anoka, Minnesota. I love Anoka but it has its limits.

My weekend: Friday I was writing a book, and that night my love and I went to see “Death of a Salesman” on Broadway. Saturday, I worked. I got a call from my doctor saying the CT scan showed that my right hip wasn’t broken when I fell on it but only had a huge hematoma that would ache for a few weeks, and that night we went to a wedding of a friend’s daughter at the famous Hotel Chelsea on West 23rd Street and a dinner and dancing that followed. A hundred guests, and I looked around as the DJ started spinning the discs with a walloping bass beat I could feel in my butt and I was the oldest person in the room at 83 and I was in a state of delight and started swaying and twisting with my love. Sunday, I slept until 12:30 p.m.

The Windy City: Watch your step

I did a show in Chicago last week and I’m sorry you weren’t there because it was so fabulously good. I’m from Minnesota and was brought up not to say that but I’m 83 and it’s time to take liberties. I was also brought up to tell the truth, so there. I’ve started a new career as a stand-up comic. My mother, who has departed this world, loved comedians even though she was brought up Brethren, and I used to tell her jokes and when she laughed it made me feel loved. And the Chicago audience laughed like crazy. They came to have a good time and I didn’t get in their way by talking about politics and after ninety minutes they gave me a standing ovation and we all went home.

I do the show standing-up but it’s not all jokes and I avoid snark and sarcasm — I think irony is for teenagers. I believe that life is a gift and that our existence here on this planet is a miracle and I am grateful for it. Grateful for the innovations such as Earl Grey ice cream and search engines, online newspapers, the urinal that flushes when I step back and for the fact that I can say, “Alexa, play the Rolling Stones’ ‘Brown Sugar’” and she does, no need to dig through the shelf of LPs. I could find the Rolling Stones on YouTube but then I’d have to sit through commercials for retirement homes, energy drinks, and stool softeners.

Looking around, not looking ahead

Driving through northern Iowa last week, the flattest farmland in America, I thought of my Uncle Jim and the old Keillor farm I loved as a kid, the big barn and haymow, The cows he milked by hand twice a day, the horses Prince and Ned who pulled the hayrack, a magical place for a boy. My dad, who grew up on that farm, hated it because he saw it as perpetual poverty. He was eager to make a break and start over. He was not nostalgic. I am but I was only a visitor.

It was dramatic to drive for hundreds of miles and see no barns or silos, no windmill or grove around a farmhouse, the Grant Wood landscape of rural America, and see what corporate industrial agriculture looks like. It looks like Siberia. A place you send people as punishment.