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 got off a Delta flight in Fargo, N.D., last week and heard a brass band playing “Over There” and found the terminal packed with hundreds of people waving flags, holding up signs, welcoming a planeload of men returning from Washington who, I was told, were veterans who’d gone to the capital to see the sights. Many of them were old guys like me, Vietnam vets, and some were younger, from the Iraq and Afghanistan era, and the crowd was very boisterous and happy as they came down the escalator and the thirty-piece band, sitting at music stands, played through “From the halls of Montezuma” and “When the caissons go rolling along” and “Off we go into the wild blue yonder” and “Anchors aweigh, my boys” and the crowd was clapping along with these old upbeat tunes about the giddy pleasure of going off to war.
Little kids got caught up in the spirit of the moment and so did I, even though it meant that my baggage took forever to show up. A woman walked over to the band and yelled, “You sound great!” which simply wasn’t true — they sounded like a bunch of middle-aged men who enjoyed playing music without having to practice regularly, but it was such a happy occasion, I had assumed at first it was for a returning victorious football team or perhaps National Guardsmen returning from a tour in Kosovo, but no, it was simply for old vets returning from a vacation trip.
Read MoreI am a morning person, it is when I do my best work, and it took me until I was 40 to realize this plain fact, which is a shame, I being 82 now, which is why I intend to live to be 97 as my mother did, so I won’t have wasted half my life, only two/fifths. I spent twenty years trying to be an evening person by downing a glass of Scotch and then a glass of wine or two or three so as to be charming and witty, but for Christians glamor and wittiness is a steep and rocky path, we are meant to be productive, but the hangover from the Scotch and wine clouded my mornings and made my writing dark and ironic like Kafka’s, stories of hopeless struggle against a mysterious fate, which I don’t believe, I believe in redemption.
I quit drinking by quitting it. I didn’t want to spend a couple weeks in treatment at Alky Camp dealing with my underlying problems, I just wanted to ditch the Scotch so I did. I drank ginger ale instead. I also stopped smoking one day. I’d been a chain-smoker because I thought that’s what writers do, but all I really enjoyed was lighting the cigarette and exhaling, the inhaling part made me feel bad, so I stopped. I kept a pencil in my pocket and if I needed to, I stuck it in my mouth.
Read MoreI walked into the Baltimore airport at 7:15 Friday morning, checked a bag, and walked to the end of the endless Boarding line, which moved swiftly back and forth between the straps, was sniffed by a dog, photographed by a TSA lady, went through the hypermagnetic sonar encephaloscanner, was declared sane, and got to a café near my gate and my coffee was poured at 7:40. A good beginning to a day.
The night before I had done my solo show at the Strand Theatre in York, PA. The stage looked big and empty and I worried that the audience would expect me to dance or do cartwheels so I did the show from the house, walking up and down the aisles, which people seemed to like. I start off by singing a prayer, an Episcopal rouser, an anti-thong song, a hymn to perseverance (“So do your work, keep going straight ahead, and you can be a genius after you are dead”), an homage to summer and a descriptive song about the journey of sperm in search of a willing egg, all from memory while ambulating in close proximity to the customers and shaking a few hands. At first I was blinded by the spotlight and had to tread carefully lest I trip and land in someone’s lap but I ascended about one-third of the way back and then I could see people so I did the show from there — 400 people could see me and for the 200 down front it was like radio.
Read MoreSome lessons are best learned slowly rather than all at once, such as “Don’t attempt to move rapidly indoors in utter darkness, especially if it’s not your house.” It has led to grief for numerous persons, few of whom will ever tell you about it, so it’s a lesson you’ll have to learn on your own, which is the best way.
I, for example, have learned, “Do vigorous exercise while you still can because if you don’t, then you can’t.” Jumping jacks, for example: one day they’re a piece of cake and so you figure, “Why waste the time?” and then you try to do one and it’s very humorous. The same is true of running: one day you can lope along like an elderly but still respectable antelope and then one day strangers will stop you and ask if there’s anything they can do to help. No, there probably isn’t.
Read MoreWhat in God’s name has happened to American newspapering? The Washington Post recently printed pictures from its 25th Annual Travel Photo contest for readers. They also published a column titled “How To Spark Joy In Your Life” and a story about the rescue of an escaped water buffalo in rural Iowa (the story said, “Water buffaloes are unusual in the area” in what one assumes was a humorous aside).
My friends, the Washington Post is in Washington to uncover corruption, malfeasance, ineptitude, and outright dishonesty. That is why God put it there. It is not there to publish photographs of Zion National Park and tell me how to spark joy in my life or cover unusual wildlife in rural Iowa. I swear to God this is the truth. God Himself will spark joy in my life if He chooses to and He can care for rare wildlife too, and if you want to see pictures of national parks, look them up online, you’ll find canyons and geysers and rock formations like you wouldn’t believe.
Read MoreThe last lovely days of summer are upon us when I sit on the porch of a little white house across the river from a marina and am grateful it’s not my house and I don’t own a boat. I’m a free man. Someone else gets to clean the gutters and I’m under no obligation to rev up the outboard and take people for a ride up the river and back. I’ve been on several boat rides in my long life and several is enough, I sailed across the Atlantic on the Queen Mary II once, five days in a Hilton that vibrates, hanging out with light-headed people in spangly clothes.
The freedom to not do what you don’t like is basic in a free society. I resist hiking, boating, golfing, climbing; I prefer porching. Summer goes against my nature except when a good thunderstorm comes crashing and flashing in and I observe divine wrath hurled down upon the wicked, it satisfies the Puritan in me. I appear to be a liberal but down deep I am a man in a tall black hat with a buckle on it. And now that the party of Lincoln that was formed to set Black people free from slavery has become the party of yellow golf pants, there isn’t enough lightning to reform it.
Read MoreI swear I never thought the day would come when I would arrive for a summer weekend at a rural paradise and suddenly be in a panic that I may have left the charger for my hearing aids at home in the city. I never thought I’d see that day but now I have. I once was young and gay, not gay in today’s sense but what we meant back in 1962, and I could hear a pin drop and now I couldn’t hear a bowling pin if it dropped on my head. I suffered this plague for you, my beloved radio listeners. In your service, I turned the headphones up high because, being young and gay, I felt that music needed to be LOUD to be a full emotional experience, that the body itself needed to vibrate vigorously. I was wrong. I know that now and now is much too late.
At any rate, I did not leave the charger at home, it was simply in a secret compartment of my briefcase, the sort of place one might keep nuclear secrets if there were such a thing, so I wore my hearing aids to dinner at the neighbors’ and so I could understand them to the extent that language is part of understanding. Otherwise, it would’ve been like an evening among the Sanskrit-fluent and I would’ve had to maintain a facial expression of comprehension and curiosity and this is no easy matter. My facial muscle memory is a scowl learned in my fundamentalist youth. It’s hard to overcome the influence of Jeremiah at the age of 82.
Read MoreI am still working full time at the age of 82, which sometimes gives me pause and I wonder, Why? I’ve had a rich full career. I sang on the Grand Ole Opry once. I played Radio City Music Hall, riding up on the stage elevator accompanied by Chet Atkins and Leo Kottke. I once made a movie in which I was kissed by Meryl Streep. Only on the cheek, but still. A portrait of me once appeared in the Seed Art exhibit at the Minnesota State Fair, my face done with seeds, mostly wheat, some corn. I am one of the best limericists in America (There was an attractive stockbroker who beat everybody at poker. Her dress was revealing and also concealing the ace of hearts and the joker.) How much does a man need before he decides it’s enough?
The truth is that I have nothing else to do, no hobbies, no interest in travel, I have no social life because my friends are all in bed by 9 p.m., so I keep working. I know that a man with time on his hands can easily go wrong, even an Episcopalian like me. I could easily drive up to the drive-up window and tell the teller to empty her cash drawer and take the dough to Memphis and find a gin-soaked honky-tonk woman who’ll take me for a ride across her shoulder or, as an alternative, I can write a novel, which is what I was doing this morning.
Read MoreI flew to Minnesota to have my eyes looked at and coming into TSA territory, approaching the magnetometer, I waited for the agent to point at my shoes and yell, “Are you over seventy-five?” and give me the pleasure of saying, “Thank you very much. I’m eighty-two.” Simple vanity on my part. But she didn’t and it struck me as an insult, the assumption that elderly people are incapable of acts of terrorism using explosive footwear. I’m no engineer but I think that by googling “incendiary soles” I could figure out a way to make my sneakers deadly.
But now it seems TSA has changed its procedures and those of us with medical implants such as my pacemaker/defibrillator must be patted down by an agent, and so I was and it made me feel important again, a potential threat to national security. I’m not a convicted felon like Whatsisname but I like to imagine I have felonious potential and being patted down by a man with a badge came as a distinct honor. A person incapable of causing trouble is ready to be packed off to Shady Acres to sit at a table and do jigsaw puzzles.
Read MoreI was in a flesh-eating mood last Sunday and so I and two other cannibals headed for a steakhouse in Midtown Manhattan –– my beloved, the vegetarian, was up in Connecticut so we were free from moral censure –– and we found a joint on West 52nd with tables out on the sidewalk so we sat there.
The carnivore section of the menu was extensive and the prices were stunning. The Japanese Wagyu steaks cost more than my quarterly tuition at the University of Minnesota back in 1961. I am often shocked by prices these days –– Tootsie Rolls were penny candy when I was a kid and now you pay $72.99 for a box of 36 –– but I stifle my shock at high prices, not wanting to seem out of touch or sound like a cheapskate. So I bit my tongue and ordered the 10 oz. Wagyu medium-rare, meat from highly sensitive cattle who are given emotional therapy and massaged daily and fed kale and arugula and mushrooms and are not slaughtered but anesthetized.
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