Where’s my guitar, darling?

I am an Episcopalian, an American citizen with a college degree, a published author, I have a great many more important concerns than trying to navigate the Delta Air Lines website to purchase a flight to MSP but I have now wasted an hour and a half and worked myself into a crimson rage trying to delete two expired credit cards from the site and put in a new one, and luckily for me I’m a liberal Democrat so I don’t own a gun, otherwise this laptop would be full of holes and cops in camo would be pounding on my door.

I see no reason Delta should treat me this way. I’m not an undocumented criminal migrant from Venezuela or a member of an Iranian sleeper cell — yes, I did dodge the draft but that was in 1971 — yes, I think the current Prez is a mafioso and his remodeled Oval Office looks like a bingo parlor and his use of capital letters reveals a Numbskull Education — and yes, I’m 83, an émigré from the age of the typewriter and the corded telephone — but my money is as good as anyone else’s and here I am grinding my teeth and cursing (dang it!) despite my evangelical upbringing, when a small hand reaches over my shoulder and finds a Delta app and fixes the problem — my wife, a graduate of a music school, a classical violinist — since when did Tchaikovsky become a prerequisite for buying a plane ticket?

Happy Fourth, don’t look ahead

I look out our back door onto the rooftops of Manhattan’s Upper West Side and try to imagine it back in 1776 when Broad Way was a dirt road among truck farms, far from City Hall where the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed aloud on July 9. A small crowd of patriots stood listening to it being read, but most of the 20,000 city residents found other things to occupy themselves, including the farmers up our way. Their crops were in, there was cultivating to be done and livestock to tend, and revolution was not a priority.

They may have agreed about the unalienable rights but overthrowing the government was another matter. When the schoolteacher Nathan Hale went spying for George Washington on Long Island that September and was caught by the British and taken to the gallows and declaimed, “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country,” he didn’t speak for many. Most people preferred to use their one and only life to earn money, go dancing, fall in love, strip naked, and beget descendants. They mostly succeeded.

Bravo, democracy, up with the underdog

I skipped the New York City primary last week because I assumed Cuomo had it in the bag with $30 million and a famous last name but no, the 33-year-old Muslim democratic socialist and his thousands of volunteers and his bold ideas and big smile captured the flag and everyone had to sit down and think again. This is the beauty of democracy, it’s an art and not a science, and sometimes it speaks clearly.

The cost of living is turning the city into a retirement home for the well-to-do with forests of skinny skyscrapers for billionaires and the folks who teach the kids and care for the sick and clean the streets and cook the meals can’t afford to live here and Zohran Mamdani promised rent controls, free child care, free buses, government-run groceries, and affordable housing, and to pay for it all by taxing the rich. Not taxing their pants off but taxing their jewelry and designer underwear.

Story of an old man in love

I am a happy man in love for many years with one woman who is from my hometown, who grew up a stone’s throw from my high school but was only three years old at the time, so I had to marry someone else while I waited to meet her as an adult. We are happy together and contented and though we disagree on numerous matters such as oatmeal (I love, she loathes), we live in harmony because I acknowledge that she is probably right. It isn’t the oatmeal I love but the brown sugar and raisins.

She loves Bruckner and brooks no disagreement on this. Alka-Seltzer disgusts her; I consider it a cure-all. She is dedicated to her book club and isn’t shy to express her frank opinion. My only book club is Sunday morning at St. Michael’s and because it is THE book, we hesitate to question it. Her church is Central Park and she’d be happy to visit it daily. She is delighted to be in a group of people and mixes easily and is curious; I take a while to warm up and sometimes don’t and stand apart and wait to escape.

An evening in the Berkshires

I did a show at Tanglewood in the Berkshires Saturday night, a big crowd on a beautiful day, and just before intermission someone told me that we had gone to war against Iran — and without mentioning the news, I asked the crowd to do me a favor — we live in feverish and fearful times, I said, and are a divided people and we need to hang onto the things we have in common such as our neglected national anthem, and they sang it, all four thousand of them, without accompaniment. It’s a magnificent song and they sang it from the heart and on “the land of the free” the sopranos sailed above us and it gave everybody something to think about.

I wish that General Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had stood behind the lectern and delivered the news of the B-2s hitting Iran with 14 thirty-thousand-pound bombs. If he had declared it a success and said that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been “completely and totally obliterated,” it would’ve been more convincing than hearing it from the real-estate developer from Queens. He posted, “A full payload of BOMBS was dropped” and a general wouldn’t have capitalized the word as if he were fond of the sound of it. You sort of felt Don was taking personal credit and hoped to build hotels in the craters. And when he said, “There’s no military in the world that could have done what we did tonight, not even close,” it was weird, coming from a draft dodger. General Eisenhower, after the D-Day invasion of Normandy, did not say, “No other military could’ve done what we did on Omaha Beach, not even close.” People who have seen battle are less likely to boast about it.

A few last words about the MAGA man

Minnesota used to be a state where if a man with a badge knocked on your door at 3:30 a.m., you’d open it and after last week’s shootings we may be considering various alternatives. Do we all need to purchase firearms? Will Apple develop a cop-detector and Siri will tell you he or she is legit? Or maybe a tranquilizer dart you shoot with a peashooter?

Will legislators and other public officials make their addresses known? Will they need to serve under pseudonyms such as X12 or YME while housed in a secure cellblock facility? Will their children need to change their names and live with foster parents? My suggestion is that we hire Canadians to legislate and adjudicate; their country seems to be running well, why not import experts?

The link between language and gunshots

Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, were shot and killed in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, a mile from where I grew up, where my dad built a house in 1947 and he and Mother raised six children. Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, were shot north of there in Champlin, across the river from Anoka where I was born. My nephew and his wife and kids live in the house Dad built and after the shootings they locked themselves in the house and tried to stay calm.

I sat in New York, watching state officials express shock, horror, resolve to catch the perpetrator, grief for the families, and I thought of the peaceful suburb I knew, houses on acre lots with big gardens, kids walking to school, the Mississippi a stone’s throw away, skating on it in the winter. And I felt that more needed to be said than shock and resolve.

I feel strangely elated

I feel strangely elated about the Prairie Home Companion shows coming up this week, think they may be the best we’ve ever done, which is odd for an almost-83-year-old guy to think, plus which I’m a Minnesotan and elation doesn’t come naturally to us.

On the road doing comedy

I was on a long car trip, Atlanta to Nashville to St. Louis to Chicago, doing my stand-up comedy act this week, and in St. Louis came the horrible video of the jetliner going down in Ahmedabad, crashing into the medical college, the pilot’s Mayday cry of “I have no thrust,” the horrific death toll, one passenger surviving, and I sat backstage at the club, asking myself, “Do I mention this tragedy?” It seems perverse to ignore it but sort of sanctimonious to mention it — and how do I do it? Say a prayer? Ask for a moment of silence. And how to make a bridge from the elegiac to the jokes, which is what the customers came for. So I went out and did my act. Life is precarious and so we should be grateful and I will show my gratitude by making people laugh.

I took up gratitude some years ago when Dr. Dearani at Mayo replaced a valve in my heart and I went for a walk down the hall the next morning, thinking about my aunt and uncles who died in their 50s from the same congenital malfunction. I had come to the end of my life expectancy and was operating on gift time. It had nothing to do with good diet and exercise, it was about fine technology. I’m a writer, I’m not sure I could sew a patch on a pair of jeans. And on that walk, I gave up satire and snark and the fine art of spitballing the pretentious solemnity of poohbahs and solipsists and turned to the adoration of competence and ingenuity and nobility. This is a good strategy especially during the reign of America’s first utterly corrupt president. Pay him mind and he will wear you out and make you feel hopeless about the country. I choose not to be.

Whistler and Rembrandt and Trump

I am not surprised about the rift that occurred between me and Donald Trump, I always knew that his friendships are measured in months and though he said beautiful things about me, called me the Greatest American Writer in History, and he appointed me head of the Department of Government Empathy and I taught him how to tell a joke, which he had never done before, how to hug a small child without terrifying it, how to limit his use of the First Person Singular and try to Decapitalize Key Words and Phrases. I tried to talk him out of the 51st State, the Gulf of America, Alcatraz, the idea that opposition to Israeli policy is antisemitic. And so, for him to order my deportation showed poor judgment and I dropped the bomb and during Pride Month I showed pictures of Don and his Big Beautiful Bill. Everyone in the White House knew he had a boyfriend and suddenly they were in panic mode.

But unlike him, I have a life. I was in a cab on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan heading for a meeting and I told the cab driver 730 and he thought I said 73rd and stopped there and I knew it was wrong but my phone rang and it was my grandson who’d come to town with his girlfriend the day before and I was making plans with him on the phone while pulling out my Visa card to pay the cabfare and I opened the door, watching for fast electric delivery bikes in the bike lane and I got out, and realized I’d left my billfold on the seat of the cab and I yelled but a Harley roared past and my grandson was alarmed but I assured him I was okay and I stood there in bright sunlight, dazed, realizing I hadn’t asked for a receipt so I didn’t know the cab number and all my money was in the billfold, plus ID and credit cards, which was a shock but there was nothing to be done, and I called my wife and got voicemail and remembered that she was going to the Frick Museum on Fifth Avenue and 70th, and I headed that way.