One more day, one more airport

For the first time in living memory, I was the only passenger in a TSA security line at a major airport — Tucson, noon on a Friday, a time you’d expect Arizonans to be heading for Nome or Juneau for a weekend of darkness, but no. I wended back and forth in the maze of barriers and the guy at the conveyor seemed happy to see me. I zipped on through and counted 15 uniformed men and women defending the country against one octogenarian liberal who’s never owned a gun, hasn’t fired an explosive in fifty years and then only a few bottle rockets, and arrived at my gate two hours early, and celebrated by buying a latte at a coffee stand that offers tables and chairs.

This is a great boon to authors, having a table in an airport to set the laptop on, and few airports offer them for free, not realizing that most Americans over forty are authors or thinking about becoming one. You have to buy a latte or else pay exorbitant fees to join a club and sit among software executives. I leave a $5 tip for the employees who clean the tables. And when people open up a conversation and ask about my line of work, I don’t say I’m an author because they’ll say, “I’ve been thinking about writing a book myself.”

Sitting in an airport, thinking about luck

I once, in Detroit, discovered I’d left my anti-seizure meds and blood thinner back in New York and needed to step into a drugstore and negotiate with a pharmacist for an emergency refill. He was dubious about emergency meds, wanted to see a prescription or at least an empty bottle, but a lady pharmacist recognized my voice from the radio, having been a fan of my show, and she also was his boss so thanks to a long radio career I was spared a stroke or a heart attack that morning.

Life offers us magical connections, which astonish us and for which we are grateful. I loved that show, did it for forty years, and it was all because my fundamentalist family refused to buy a TV back when everyone was getting one so I was left with a Zenith radio and listened to the last of the old radio shows, Fibber McGee and Gunsmoke and Fred Allen, which I loved, and twenty years later I launched a show with cowboys and a detective and small-town folks in it, and enough time had passed so that it was considered a novelty, not an imitation, and suddenly I had a career, one I never planned on.

A good man gone to glory

When Chip Carter spoke about his father, Jimmy, at a memorial service in Atlanta and told how, when his dad noticed the boy got a poor mark in Latin, Jimmy studied Latin so that he could teach his son, I recognized a standard of fatherhood a good deal higher than my own and I felt bad for a moment until I recalled that it wasn’t my father’s level of fatherhood either. He was a father of six kids and I recall that when I got a C in math, it was my problem and he didn’t get involved.

That was the advantage of growing up in a big family. An only child was under tremendous pressure, observed closely by mom and dad, expected to excel in scholastics and also deportment and personal charm, whereas I, the invisible middle child, was free to lie in a dark space under the basement stairs reading adventure fiction by flashlight.

Please be hesitant, Mr. President

One man can do only so much and rather than deal with the prospect of war with Panama or Denmark, I’ve decided to think about winter, seeing as I’m spending a couple weeks down South and feel guilty about it, as I well should. It was bitterly cold when I left New York and when I got in the cab to go to JFK I was wearing no overcoat, no scarf or gloves, and the cabbie looked over his shoulder, wondering if he was going to have to contend with a lunatic. Meanwhile, dear friends of mine in Washington, D.C., employees of the deep state, are dealing with a blizzard, and friends in Alaska are living in darkness, and up in Toronto when Justin Trudeau announced his resignation as prime minister, he was brief; it was freezing, he didn’t want to be seen speaking in a pitiful trembly voice.

I’m 82 and so the prospect of a war of annexation with Canada doesn’t affect me personally, but I’d only point out that Republican states (PA, MI, ND, MT) with thinly defended borders would be easily invaded and if the war extends from January 20 into February and March, the wily Canucks may have some advantages. And when we win and our northern border extends deep into the Arctic, federal officials from Florida may be flying to the far reaches of Manitoba and be unable to play golf for extended periods of time. Just saying.

It’s never too late to be normal

I know something about elitism, having grown up in the exclusive Sanctified Brethren — we refused to commune with 99.85% of Christendom, we looked down on Baptists, Anglicans, you name it, we found fault with them all, and if a Lutheran guy made off with one of our young women, we forced ourselves to attend the wedding though it was actually a funeral. And then I got a job in public radio where I got to see elitism from below. I was a mere entertainer in the midst of serious journalists and scholars, and I was seriously looked down upon by many people whom income from my show was supporting. But then parents of teenagers have gone through the same thing and survived and I did too.

I sort of regret that I didn’t become truly elite when Minnesota almost became part of New France, this territory having been “discovered” by French explorers, and France battled the English for dominance here but then Louis XV was more interested in sugar from the Caribbean than fur from the North and so he withdrew and Voltaire said, “All we lost was a few acres of snow.” This remark still stings, centuries later. We could’ve grown up speaking French and saying “Joie de vivre” with real élan and “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” and “C’est la vie” instead of saying “Well, that’s life,” which doesn’t have anything like the savoir faire of “C’est la vie.” And with “C’est la vie,” you don’t need to stick the “well” in front of it to sound casual.

My plan for the next four years

Somebody has to be the worst president in U.S. history, they can’t all be No. 14 as Joe Biden was in a survey of American historians or No. 8 like Ike or No. 35 like Nixon, and isn’t it only fair that the worst (No. 45) should be given the opportunity to improve his ranking? Of course it is. Meanwhile, I don’t need to follow his second term day by day; I can better occupy my time with the crossword puzzle and the book reviews and skip the funny pages. I don’t check my IRA every morning or my blood pressure or the WNBA standings or the air quality index, so why should I upset myself at the thought of Kash Patel running the FBI or Tulsi Gabbard as head of national intelligence or an anti-vaxxer as Secretary of Health? If I want to study lunacy, why not become a therapist and get paid for it?

So I am focused on the positive aspects of life. I’ve just succeeded at taking a lazy one-week vacation with my family at a resort in California at which I slept late and hung out beside a pool under an umbrella and sipped lavender lemonade. My work ethic relaxed severely, I was very agreeable the entire time, I even started to sort of like myself.

Texas is a real education

I flew down to Texas last week to get out of my tiny bubble on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and see that this is a big country that includes people who don’t think as I do nor even wish to. And from Texas I took my family to California to be among people who think as I did when I was younger but with uninhibited extravagance. It was quite a trip.

On Election Day, I expected Wonder Woman to win who fights for justice, peace, and equality, and she did not. It goes against what Miss Mortenson taught us in tenth-grade civics class so I went to Texas to try to make sense of it. Miss Mortenson believed in newspapers that tell the truth, the American ideal of the intrepid reporter who can’t be bought, and when I landed in Houston, I saw we’d arrived in the land of Fox — it was on giant screens in airport waiting areas and cafés — the network that coagulated entertainment and news by telling its audience what they wanted to believe and thanks to the Australian Rupert Murdoch, 70% of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen and Biden was illegitimate, and there is the heart of the illness in this country, the willingness to believe what you know is not true in order to think more of yourself and less of other people.

Man of the moment thinks back

Time magazine naming Trump “Person of the Year” is an interesting idea, sort of like naming a mortician to be your heir, but there it is. Life has its oddities. These days I’m walking around with a chorus of “Halle, Hallelujah” echoing in my head, from a Christmas song, “Light in the Stable,” I sang with some women the other day. I just sang a bass line, which is like inviting a mortician to your birthday party, but it felt good to me and now the refrain will not — simply refuses to — go away. I need my mind. I use it for various things. I can’t donate it to praising a child in a manger. He’s got cathedrals galore, choirs, gigantic organs, Bible classes.

I have just poured some coffee an inch to the left of my coffee cup and I hold the Hallelujah chorus responsible. Poured it on the kitchen table and it spread under the laptop I am writing on. Thank goodness my beloved was not witness to this. She has noted gaps in my thinking, moments of global aphasia (such as the inability to remember exactly what global aphasia is), a fondness for irrelevance, a tendency to repeat myself, and also. Global aphasia.

A quiet night in Manhattan

My wife and I like to sit in the same room at night, doing our separate things, she in a chair reading a book, I at a table addressing Christmas cards. The book is by a mentally ill mountain climber worried that in an avalanche he might lose his meds for bipolarity. It’s a snowy Christmas card, I’m signing our names under a poem that ends “Onward we go, faithfully, into the dark and are there angels hovering overhead? Hark.” She is sleepy but it’s a good book and the bipolar guy is at a Buddhist camp where you meditate ten hours a day and his job is to sweep the floor with a broom made from branches. I’ve done a mountain of cards and I’m still in the K’s, Katherine, Ken, Kristina, and I’m not thinking about angels, I’m thinking what if Elon Musk sells himself the U.S. Postal Service for $125 million, half of what he paid for the Republican Party, and of course it goes online and merges with X and you’ll speak the inscription to be written cursively in your distinctive style. The p.o. is gone and polio and smallpox return and the F.B.I.J. investigates journalists and it all happens without anybody commenting on it and a second-grader calls 911 to report an active shooter in the next classroom of a Christian school.

It’s at times like this I think maybe I should see a neurologist. Then remember I saw Dr. Fink two weeks ago and he said my eyes are focused somewhat apart, not together, and the cardiologist said arrhythmia might be causing the dizziness, and the eyelid guy said he didn’t think surgery would help. He was the first left-handed physician I’ve seen in ages and I was fascinated by it. My handwriting is big and bold, using a black Sharpie, and I write “Blessings!” under the “Hark” to indicate that I mean it, it is a blessing despite the cash flowing into Bezos’s coffers, people crave Christmas. Normal folks, crazy ones, kooks, awake in the night and hear spooks, and look for a light, a star shining bright, a family in the Gospel of Luke’s.

The sweet day draws near

I did a Christmas show last week in St. Paul that ended with the audience singing “Silent Night,” three verses, a cappella, the infant tender and mild, the quaking shepherds, the radiant beams, and minutes later who should come backstage but my cousin Phyllis and her family, which made me happy. Her mother was my aunt Jean, who was funny and had a big heart and who, when I was a toddler and Dad went into the Army, took my mother and her three little kids into her big house in St. Paul and I still remember how welcome we were. There was a chair at the table that I guarded and if anyone tried to sit in it, I said “Daddy’s chair” and waved them away.
 
I go back home now and then and people walk up to me in the Hotel St. Paul who remember me as a friendly radio voice and some of them were apparently quite attached to that voice — I met a young woman last week who gasped as if I were a ghost and said, “We listened to you every Saturday at five o’clock. I still miss you.”