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
I flew to Duluth Saturday to an enormous hockey arena to watch my tall handsome grandson in his black robe and mortarboard walk forward and accept his college degree and what made the long trip and the boring ceremony more than worthwhile — essential, imperative — was to witness the delight of his girlfriend, Raina, sitting next to me in the high bleachers, her focus on the processional during “Pomp and Circumstance,” her cry of “There he is!” and out came the smartphone for video and as he crossed the stage to get his degree, she whooped and yelled and hopped up and down and so did I.
More important than a college degree is the love of a good woman, and seeing this elegant funny well-spoken willowy woman in the long dress in love with him and he with her — I would’ve gone to Alaska to see it, Auckland, Tuscaloosa, Turkestan.
Read MoreFame is fleeting, especially semi-celebratedness is, as I know very well from my own experience, and that is exactly as it should be. The earth spins around the sun, the constellations pass by, tall trees fall in the forest, their trunks chewed by chipmunks, and Johnny Larson, once the emperor of late-night TV, is now a small footnote, Walter Contrite, Dave Caraway, all gone, and in my category of fame, Men of Letters, there is no such thing as true celebrity anymore, no Hemingways, no Frosts or Tennessee Williamses, just Caramel Cream, Cashew Crunch, and Cocoa Delight. I am Vanilla.
Fifty years ago a writer could set out to write about the weekly doings of a small Midwestern town, and so I did, but now you need dragons or vicious criminals or diaphanously clad ladies swanning around as described by artificial intelligence. I am a back issue.
Read MoreMay is here and we only get one a year and a person needs to go outdoors and take a deep breath, walk away from the news, which rubs our faces in the angry arrogant pointless presidency of a bonehead, and walk in the park and observe the delight of kindergarteners leashed together like sled dogs, heading for a grassy lawn to be unleashed and go dashing around, yelling, laughing, New York apartment kids thrilled by freedom of movement, running in circles, playing tag, hiding behind trees. And the tulips are in full color and food trucks are grilling brats and street musicians are strumming and drumming and the world is joyful.
I grew up among solemn fundamentalist men and their dutiful wives, and though Scripture mentions joy they avoided it themselves, but we kids found it by chasing each other, skipping stones on the river, shooting baskets, skating, daredevil bicycling, and in May joy is hard to suppress, especially in the north, you walk down the street with a root beer float and smell new-mown grass and observe girls in summer dresses and hear “I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day” sung to a rhythm track and you realize that delight is a necessity, our sanity depends on it. Whatsoever things are lovely, think on those things, said the apostle Paul and so I put away the paper and go for a walk in the park and look for little kids and there it is. God did not put us here to be insulted and tormented, and live under malign corrupt leadership.
Read MoreI board the plane at LaGuardia where everything goes well until I reach TSA and a uniformed woman asks if I have any metal implants in my body and I say that I do. “What do you have?” she asks. I want to say, “German shell fragments from the Battle of Ypres. General Haig sent us across muddy fields directly into point-blank Austrian artillery. A horse collapsed on me and saved my life and I alone am left to tell the tale.” But I say, “Pacemaker” and she directs me to a gentleman who gives me a full-body pat-down the same as if I were being deported to El Salvador, and I am cleared to go to MSP instead.
Delta Air Lines signs along the passage tell me I am soon to get the “Me Time” that I deserve and meet the flight crew that will Feel Like Friends and receive Nourishment for the Soul, but coming from the Midwest I doubt this. An airliner is not a recovery center.
Read MoreThe 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.
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